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Your receipt is wrong because the nrst is figured exclusive of any state or local taxes.

Actually, you're wrong, but it's hard to tell with the tax inclusive rates. I just had a typo on the cost of the item. It should have been $29.65. Other than that, the numbers are correct...and confusing.

The corrected receipts:

Item description	$ 29.65
8.25% sales tax	2.44
TOTAL	$32.09

With a NRST, this receipt becomes:

Item description	$ 29.65
8.25% state & local sales tax	2.44
23% national sales tax	8.85
TOTAL	$40.94

A couple of things about your receipt. First of all, if the state is administering the NRST, the state sales tax would conform to NRST definitions. This would dramatically lower the rate, as it increases the base of what the state sales would cover.

Secondly, the price for the item before federal taxes will be less than the pre-NRST price that includes federal taxes and their affects. It doesn't really matter from the standpoint of confusion, but I thought I'd just throw it out there as a reminder.

Now, I'd agree with you that on the receipt, the tax-exclusive form should be used (the legislation explicitly calls for the tax-inclusive version). The main reason why is that the tax-exclusive rates for federal and state can be added together to get the effective tax-exlcusive rate. This is not true for tax-inclusive rates. For example:

Assuming tax-exlusive rates of 30% and 5% for federal and state, on a $100 (pre-tax) purchase, $30 federal sales tax and $5 state sales tax are collected. The total tax is $35, which is 35% of $100, and equal to 30% federal plus 5% state.

Now, if tax-inclusive rates are used, the federal rate is 23% and the state rate is 4.8%. The total tax is still the same, but it works out to 25.9% tax-inclusive, which is lower than the sum of the 23% and 4.8% individual rates.

In short -- while comparing NRST rates to income/payroll taxes, I prefer using tax-inclusive for equitable comparison, but for receipts, tax-exclusive makes more sense for readability.