People love the convenience of simply swiping a credit card or tapping their smartphones when making a purchase, but now lawmakers want to micromanage these transactions line by line, imposing intrusive bureaucracy that will add costs and interference to a well-oiled machine.

When a customer makes an electronic payment, data on the sales travels from the register to the merchant’s bank, to a card network, to the customer’s bank, and back again, giving a thumbs up or down on the transaction. Along with this instant authorization, there’s fraud protection and a guarantee that the merchant gets paid even if the customer doesn’t pay his bill.

To finance this massive payment network—which Americans use billions of times each day—card companies charge an interchange fee, typically a percentage of the total sale. Some politicians now want to exempt the sales tax portion of a bill from being subject to that interchange fee.

The proposal sounds modest: buy a $50 item in a state with a 6% sales tax, and the pitch is that the network should collect its fee on $50, not $53. Who could object to shaving off a few pennies from such a transaction? But the pennies aren’t the point—it’s the mechanics.

Sales tax varies widely around the country. States like Delaware have no sales tax and ban local governments from charging one. Alaska has no sales tax, but local jurisdictions can charge up to 7.5%, which happens to be the state sales tax in California. But then local governments can add several percentage points on top of that.

Then there are “Urban Enterprise Zones” in some New Jersey cities where qualifying sellers only have to collect and remit half the state sales tax, so the rate drops from 6.625% to 3.3125%—but only for certain businesses in certain cities.

There are countless examples of the myriads of exemptions for sales taxes across the country. Then there are also additional sales taxes levied on other purchases, further complicating the issue. In short, sales tax is surprisingly a fast-moving target that changes by state, by county, by city, by special district, and by product.

To strip out sales tax from every interchange would require additional layers of bureaucracy and central planning of the checkout line. Merchants would need to send information on the payment rails at the point of sale, noting where groceries are taxed one way but prepared food another, or which jurisdictions tax clothing and which don’t.

Proponents frame this as a blow against a credit-card cartel and its hated "swipe fees." There is a real debate to be had about competition among card networks, but the cure here is worse than the disease. It doesn’t introduce competition nor does it lower any costs for consumers.

It simply orders private payment systems to be rebuilt around an incredibly variable tax code and hands the blueprint to bureaucrats who have never written a line of checkout software in their lives.

The costs of that redesign will hit consumers. Reprogramming terminals, re-certifying online checkout flows, and untangling exemptions will all cost time and money. And because these rules vary not only state by state but even city by city, a business selling across state lines faces not one standard but 50—or 500.

Instead of saving a few cents, the mandate would become a permanent tax, falling hardest on small businesses least able to absorb it.

This unconventional and largely unworkable proposal supposedly came about because lawmakers found it objectionable for a fee to be charged on a tax the government imposed. But if lawmakers truly believe it’s unfair for customers to pay interchange fees on sales tax, then lower the overall sales tax in their jurisdictions. While they’re at it, simplify it too, creating the broadest base possible with the lowest rate possible.

That’d give consumers real relief that they could see on their receipts. Instead, the proposal would effectively put a Department of Motor Vehicles inside every cash register and every online checkout page. The infamous model of government inefficiency would be even worse for a system that has to work billions of times a day, in two seconds, without a line.

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E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist and Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., is senior economist at the Heritage Foundation.

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