At least personally (and with a few friends) my experience is that not merely is that argument wrong, it's literally backwards. Taxes are frequently painful eno

At least personally (and with a few friends) my experience is that not merely is that argument wrong, it's literally backwards. Taxes are frequently painful enough that by the time I'm finished I'm ready to pay anything the computer tells me to so long as it's just over with. This year TurboTax had my taxes go up about 27% despite my income going down and no extra write-offs and I have no idea why, but I just paid it. I don't really have any interest in revisiting it and trying to dig through things either, because even if I had the free time (which I don't) I'd much rather spend it on other things, and anyway I figure taxes are normally too low in America anyway. Some friends now just pay a professional to do it (which I'm considering for next year), but that still means that now you have to pay even more money for something the IRS could and should just be doing for us all anyway by default. It'd make more sense in the normal scheme of things to only have to pay more to investigate if something seems off. I mean even in general it's hardly an uncommon strategy by shadier companies to get people to pay more: make the process so convoluted and tiresome that people will pay whatever just to make it all go away (hell, see most of the medical industry for a big current events example). It seems like even if someone did want to embark upon an anti-tax strategy it'd make way more sense to increase transparency and ease, just have a big number in an envelope of "We calculate you must pay $X this year, which is $Y (more|less) then last year". Then if it's significantly more people can just focus on that while fresh, rather then arriving to that result after hours of going through stuff with nebulous "you may be audited by the IRS you potential criminal!" hanging over it all and thus being exhausted. So even taking Norquist's goal as a given (which I don't) the strategy seems pretty damn stupid to me at least. The primary result has been that I now hate Norquist and every single person who goes along with him, and would cheerfully support higher, easier taxes not just because easy would be nice but also to piss him off.