As expat returning to the US after 7 years, it's clear that US is headed in the wrong direction because it has made decades of poor choices, particularly w.r.t. taxation and long-term investments, and is sliding rapidly into dysfunction. And the confusion that has led to those poor choices seems pretty well-summarized in your first comment.
What I am against is the notion that it's not mine. That by default it belongs to the government and it's only out of the goodness of their heart they allow me to keep some.
It's the other way around. We form a government and we decide what we want to contribute to it with taxes.
We decide we need a school, a road, engage in war, etc., and we contribute to those efforts via tax contributions.
I don't want to contribute to never ending wars, I don't want to contribute to subsidizing companies that export jobs, etc. I want money to train inner city kids, rural kids, not some reconstruction in some place that has much less immediate effect on us.
Did you attend school at any point? Do you use any civil infrastructure? Does the public fund or buy your work? Do you use any tools made by others?
The Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman worker who creates value solely through individual effort is a harmful one, because it ignores the importance of society in shaping the individual and it ignores all of the invisible inputs into the work of every individual. Nobody's salary is entirely "theirs" because nobody creates value without the involvement of others.
We pay taxes. It's our money, then we pay some of it to the government to support the government, and pay for the myriad of ways in which the government supports us.
It is not possible to live in this country and not be supported by government services in a dizzying variety of ways, visible and invisible. Those services cost money. Therefore, we pay taxes for them.
"In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving".
I'm saying it is indeed our money. Not the government's; we choose to part with some, but the taxed money was never the government's. It was always ours.
It's like giving a kid an allowance, and then one day you say you don't have enough to give them that week/month, whatever, and they say, but it's "my" money. No it's not.
As for it being "your money"....sure, one can say it's "your money", but you owe it to the government for services they provide on an ongoing and pervasive basis. It's like a subscription fee for civilized living.
But I have as much right to my money as I have a right not to be raped. Society provides for all this in our social contract. We can choose to include income taxes in that, but we don't have to. We didn't have them initially as a republic.