I am definitely not a Grover Norquist fan, but I do taxes for a living and a lot of people are VERY surprised at the amount that is withheld from their paycheck

I am definitely not a Grover Norquist fan, but I do taxes for a living and a lot of people are VERY surprised at the amount that is withheld from their paychecks, but they never notice how much it is unless something happens and they are required to write a check. A couple illustrations: It's very common for people to owe tax at a lower rate than they did the year before, but be upset because they have to write a check (and this is when the amount is trivial relative to wealth, so it's not because of financial inconvenience). They don't think in terms of tax rates, just in terms of do they owe or not. Owing is worse than not owing, regardless of total tax paid. And these are successful, otherwise financially savvy people. There are also people who try things they think are "tricks" to maximize their refund that are literally just paying more in. They think a giant refund is great, not realizing that it's just money that they could have not sent to the IRS in the first place. Once again, owing bad, refunds good. This is all to say that I believe people are indeed, to some extent, blindly paying more taxes than they would agree to if they had to write a check every month for the amount due. For a lot of people, even people who don't make very much, if they paid their half of their payroll taxes with a check every month, it would be pretty close to the biggest bill they have each month, and it goes basically unnoticed by most people. For the record, I don't have any problem at all with current tax rates, but I know very well what they are, and I think if there was more transparency and education, I don't believe it would lead to people wanting to raise tax rates, but that's just my opinion.