An interesting hack on that outlook is my home state spends a lot of money on bureaucracy and paperwork to "stealth up" what we do with a fraction of gasoline t

An interesting hack on that outlook is my home state spends a lot of money on bureaucracy and paperwork to "stealth up" what we do with a fraction of gasoline taxes which offset the general fund (aka lower our state income tax) and we obfuscate the heck out of state lotto income by embedding it in prop tax relief. It would be possible to hack the system by getting rid of all the stealth and corruption and just issuing each of us a check for the gas tax and lotto tax. Then just issue simple, cheap, straightforward normal un-obfuscated prop tax bills and un-obfuscated state income tax forms. As a side dish WRT "The government's money" all of this money came from voluntary participation in various tax schemed monopolies and centrally controlled economic planning. A state level "mincome" funded entirely by lotto players and gas tax and so forth is interesting. It should be sustainable and cheaper overall than the current system of byzantine complexity. Frankly we have a large number of "bribes" paid to the government by non-humans. It would be interesting rather than slush funding them and obfuscating them to mincome all incoming bribe money. All state corporate income tax, all our weird little excises and fees and utility cable tv franchise fees, all of it goes to mincome and the government itself can only accept personal human being state income tax for general revenue. Its an interesting mental model and if implemented would likely save a lot of money... obfuscation is expensive after all. I'm pretty well paid and spend pretty freely, I'd likely remain a net tax payer, but I could imagine many poor people continuing to pay very little tax and getting the same state mincome check.