It’s because FTC regulations requiring fee-inclusive pricing go into effect on May 10th. Everyone dealing with short term rentals and hotels in the US will be updating to this over the next few weeks.

I’ve been using Hardcover. Still very much a WIP and community is still pretty small but it seems very promising with a public api and ambitions to open source.

America has thousands of tax jurisdictions, every state, county, city/town can impose their own set of taxes. For the longest time, online shopping was effectively tax-free shopping unless you happened to be based in the same state as the seller. That is largely not the case anymore though as various states passed legislation to enforce tax collections on online sales rather than trust the consumer to volunteer that info when it’s time to fill out tax forms.

Agreed 100% but it is more complicated for online shopping in general as sales tax is largely unknown in many cases until you have billing or shipping address which is not always known upfront.

In the case of this rule though, related to events and short term lodgings, there is a pretty obvious jurisdiction in most cases so allowing a “government charges” exemption is nonsense.

There is already traction here at the state-level. It’s been the law in California since the summer and Minnesota has something similar going into force on Jan 1st.

I expect many more states to follow with their own rules if these federal rules die with the new administration. I expect some noise to be made but wouldn’t be surprised if it survives for some time to avoid more complex state-level that would be more expensive to manage.

This is a NY state criminal trial, the president can only pardon federal crimes. Doesn’t mean shenanigans can’t happen but it’s unlikely to go away the moment Trump gets into office.