A landlord who rents to you at BELOW the cost of the mortgage + property taxes + maintenance may have his reasons (appreciation) but overall that's not a sustainable activity.
Perhaps the most obvious is gas taxes or CRV taxes on cans, those get passed along directly. If you doubled gas taxes tomorrow, the price paid at the pump would rise - it wouldn't just be absorbed by the company.
Now conversely, when you drop taxes, that doesn't necessarily immediately get passed along, but if there is competition, it eventually will.
How much of that is left over for your landlord to spend? When they spend it, how much of that money is going towards paying yet other peoples' taxes? Those are your third order taxes.
For every $1 you make, about 3 steps down the spending chain, only $0.2 is in the hands of the people and $0.8 is in the hands of the IRS. That's what I meant by an 80% taxation rate.
If taxes were lower, all of your stuff including rent could be vastly cheaper.
There are countries with far better infrastructure that have less taxes. The US loves spending tax dollars on a bunch of inefficiencies and meddling in the affairs of other countries I will never live in, with my money.
I will say that what you spend your money on has a huge impact of how much the IRS gets at the end of the day. For an extreme example, if you give the money to a 501c then it's not taxed, and there are several ways the 501c could spend the money that wouldn't be taxed....
* ~14k in federal income tax * ~6k in state income tax (varies by state) * ~6k for social security * ~3k for property tax (varies by location and property value) * ~1k for medicare
That's 34%. It's hard to imagine another 46% on sales tax, tariffs, usage tax, car tag, etc. You could argue for another 7k (7%) in second order payroll taxes, but I don't know what you could consider a "third-order" tax. Please enlighten me.