Exactly, which should illustrate just how pointless this calculation is. Obviously spending 99.9% of national resources on tax collection would be a colossal wa

Exactly, which should illustrate just how pointless this calculation is. Obviously spending 99.9% of national resources on tax collection would be a colossal waste from the public's point of view despite the "positive ROI". The IRS supposedly exists to benefit the public; maximizing the amount transferred from private citizens to the government is not the end goal here. The benefit to the public from having that money spent by the government rather than by those individual members of the public who earned it is at best a small fraction of the total amount of tax collected, and may even be negative.