Court Opinion

ID: 9534499
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:40:22.616622+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:30:55.949761
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
Respectfully I dissent. The statute is clear enough. It requires the vendor to collect a tax. on “every retail sale.” This is in the singular. It does not say on thousands of individual sales in the aggregate. Under the statute the merchant can’t collect more than the going tax base.1 Un*80der the Commission’s regulation he can’t absorb the tax himself. Under another regulation he has to absorb it by paying on aggregate sales. So he can’t collect and can’t pay but has to pay anyway. His payment on the aggregate sales is absorption, which o-stensibly is illegal. The impossibility of collecting taxes on sales under 15 cents together with refusal to pay the tax himself, also is illegal. He is in a taxpayer cul de sac.
No kind of syllogistic reasoning can justify this carousel in logic, and the bracket system seems to be the difficulty. The bracket system is a regulation that flies in the teeth of the statute and subordinate to the latter, which is clear, that the merchant must collect a tax on “every retail sale,” — not on an aggregate of sales where the “5 and 10” man sells only items for which such charge is made. If the token system were in effect the tax could be collected. It was abolished. It is unrealistic to say that after its abolition, the merchant automatically must reduce the price of his article by including the tax in the former price.
CALLISTER, J., concurs in the views expressed in the dissenting opinion of HENRIOD, C. J.

. Except where fractions are involved, which would require him to collect a penny on a penny piece of ball gum, and turn it over to tlie state, completely absurd.