Configuring tax for all of North America?

Hi all - new here. I am trying to figure out how to configure the tax for shipping to Canada and the Unites States. I have finished configuring the Canadian tax, and it seems to be working correctly. But I can't figure out how to get a tax rate to show up in the shopping cart for the United States.

I first had a flat rate of 5% for US purchases, but it wasn't showing because the advice in the Zen literature was to mark the tax as GST/HST/PST class in my products, which then excludes the US because it doesn't actually fall into that class.

So then I moved US into the GST class (because the US flat tax and the Canadian GST are both 5% so that seemed logical). This calculates the correct 5% US flat tax, but it also causes a few problems that I don't know how to fix:

1. The shopping cart indicates tax to the US as 5% GST, which it is not; and
2. The shopping cart adds 5% to the US shipping amount, when it should not add anything.

The Zen files only explain how to configure for US or Canada, not for both, as far as I can tell. I have done what I consider a thorough search online to see if someone elsewhere had the same question answered, but couldn't find anything.

Any advice would be helful. I am not a coder, but I can follow basic directions. :yes:

unless you had a resell license in every state you would charge sale tax. i wouldnt advise you charge tax on every transaction. Every state is diffrent.
california is 7.75 while others are diffrent. You can get into alot of trouble with the IRS for eating up the tax.

but if you want to charge tax from every state you would do it in the admin page. add everystate and research what the tax rate is for each.