That is called Starve the Beast and has been the strategy of the right for decades. It goes like this: Use a slight budget deficit as an excuse to immediately cut back on services and infrastructure investments. Never raise taxes. If there's no deficit, lower the taxes on the rich while promising 'dynamic effects' that will magically increase revenue for the government. Repeat until the services are so underfunded so that they are more or less useless. Use that as proof that the government is worthless and never can provide anything of value, so it is better to privatize what is left of it. So in the end the only thing you actually pay for with your taxes is wars overseas to keep the oilprice low and corporate welfare.

It's no wonder Americans are complaining about their taxes.

I pay 25% VAT (less on e.g. food) and about 30% income tax. For that I've got a free eduction (Ph.D), can commute to work with (mostly) very good public transportation. Currently my pregnant wife is getting weekly checkups free of charge. I look forward soon start working halv time sharing 390 days of paid parental leave with my wife.

Sometimes I think I don't pay enough taxes.

I cringe at your response. There's so much wrong in it. >>Use a slight budget deficit as an excuse to immediately cut back on services and infrastructure investments

A 'slight' deficit that's led to trillions in debt over a very short period of time.

>>government is worthless and never can provide anything of value

It is mostly worthless and hardly provides value(the worst part about this is is that a lot of times, I don't even have the option to opt out of these value-free services and pick something else that works)

>>Sometimes I think I don't pay enough taxes

Only a commie would say this.

We can assume the doctor monkey is paying for his kid's school, but it's possible that doctor monkey also benefits indirectly from the other monkeys' kids education as well.

All the roads you drive on are toll roads? Here in Oregon none are, and when I was back East only some highways were toll roads. Surface streets are nearly all paid for through taxes AFAIK.

I don't get the severe anti-tax stance some folks have. Yes I want my taxes spent efficiently, but I absolutely recognize that I gain benefits from paying them. Even when some of those taxes go to poor people. Without a peaceful society nobody will care that much about computers and the 'net ;).

I admit I'm a bit biased, because I get Welfare myself. That is, the gov't gives me a fair amount of money to offset the interest I pay to the bank for my mortgage. My effective income tax rate is less than 10% so I probably get quite a lot more welfare than any really poor family does. What a world we live in.

Thank you for your well-formulated points and civil response :)

Re: roads, I agree that not all roads are toll roads. The good news is that roads are relatively inexpensive to build and maintain (for example, the federal transportation budget is only 2.3% of total yearly spending, 28 billion dollars).

So, those who want to use roads, should be charged a fair price, and road companies should compete to lower costs where possible.

The argument that "if we don't pay taxes (which are ever increasing and are going towards services that are decreasing in quality), then everyone will go nuts and modern society will collapse!!!" is actually extortion and a clever diversion.

We all want cheaper, more effective services. We all want the poorest members of society to not be kicked when they are already down.

The issue is that world governments are run by an elite few people who funnel our taxes to their bank accounts through scams and poorly rendered services.

And when we figured out this scam and went public with the info, we were yelled at to keep paying our taxes ;)

> Re: roads, I agree that not all roads are toll roads. The good news is that roads are relatively inexpensive to build and maintain (for example, the federal transportation budget is only 2.3% of total yearly spending, 28 billion dollars).

Wow, so you have an extra half-billion or so just sitting around? ($28 billion x 0.023 = $460 million) How fortunate for you!

Beggin' your pardon, M'Lord, but the peasantry doesn't consist of multi-millionaires. And they need to use roads to live their lives in a modern, industrialized society.

So, no, you can keep your libertarian dystopia where everyone has to build their own roads, hire their own police forces, etc. Go build your own civilization, away from ours.