Taxes in the US are labeled (accurately, but perceived negatively) around what you have — income tax, property tax, sales tax. For the most part, they aren't la

Taxes in the US are labeled (accurately, but perceived negatively) around what you have — income tax, property tax, sales tax. For the most part, they aren't labeled for what they _do_ (other than Social Security and Medicare taxes, programs to which cuts are political poison). If federal taxes were broken down to, say, defense taxes, infrastructure taxes, health taxes, administrative taxes, and people saw how much of what they pay goes into each fund, it would be much closer to what you describe. For instance, people would be more aware that twice as much of the tax-derived budget goes into defense and international security than to safety net programs. And people might also be more wary of actions that grow the federal debt — both spending and high-income-earning tax cuts — if they saw that more of their tax money goes to paying off its interest than toward funding infrastructure, education, and science and medical research combined. Instead, that information is buried in federal reports and reported with the perception of being policy wonkery. It doesn't have a personal impact. Seeing what you remit to the government broken down by what it's spent on would drive it home much as having Social Security and Medicare as line-items on paystubs does.