The US/MA combination works on my site. I haven’t seen unsolved problems on this aspect on this forum. So I think its specific to your setup and not a general bug.
On your test product’s Products page, General tab, ensure Tax status is set to taxable, and Tax class is set to standard.
On the Tax options page, set Display prices during cart/checkout to Excluding tax, at least while we are trying to fix this.
Ensure WP (3.9.1), WC (2.1.12) and your theme are the latest versions. That fixes a lot of problems on this forum.
I don’t know what theme you are using. Some themes replace the default WC files with their own versions. This is OK, as long as the theme author updates them regularly to accommodate changes in WP & WC. Some theme authors abandon their product. Ensure your theme is being updated regularly. Most themes have a changelog that’s worth a look.
Check the documentation if you have not already done so.
Try doing this in easy steps, ie:
1. country code = *, state code = *, everyone pays tax.
2. US / *, all states customers pay tax
3. US / MA, only MA customers pay tax
do any steps work?
Please post the url to the sample product page. There are some checks that can be done on the page.
My expectation is that if you try a different ecommerce solution you are likely to get different problems ??
