> I don't understand your last sentence, why as little as possible? It should come with a corresponding reduction in government waste. The existing government

> I don't understand your last sentence, why as little as possible? It should come with a corresponding reduction in government waste. The existing government budget contains a level of inefficiency which is difficult to comprehend. The scale of it is so large it's hard to wrap your head around it. > I would even say the more taxes you pay, the more invested in politics and civic responsibilities you would become. This doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, it tends to go the other way. The people who have lives and just want to go about their business (i.e. the middle class) are taxed heavily specifically because they don't have time to get involved in politics and then are poorly represented when politicians are slicing up the pie. The super-rich, meanwhile, are highly involved and then avoid paying. > The general ailments and downtrends in American society started right around the time when taxation (especially the corporate kind) started getting cut and we moved away from the gold standard for our money. US government revenue has been stable as a percent of GDP since the end of WWII and growing over time in real dollars per capita. Taxation per capita, even adjusted for inflation, is now higher than it was during WWII. That level of taxation is... high. As to your point, multinational corporations avoid paying those taxes: Since real government revenue has been going up rather than down, guess who pays? > For once I'd like to see a politician promise to raise taxes and use that revenue to fix things and actually win. Doing this is not really possible. Between state and federal income, payroll, sales, property and other taxes, the average person in many states is already paying more than 50% of their compensation in tax. Even if all you care about is tax revenue, there comes a point at which increasing taxes lowers government revenue. If you raise total taxes from 5% to 10% and that causes the economy to contract by 10%, that's maybe not great for wage earners, but government revenue has increased by 80%. If you raise total taxes from 55% to 60% and it causes the economy to contract by 10%, even government revenue goes down because 55% of 100 is more than 60% of 90. The problem isn't that the government doesn't have enough revenue, it's that most of that money might as well be set on fire because it spends it so inefficiently. And whether you think it should instead be returned to the taxpayer or spent in some other way, the status quo is absurd and unsustainable.