The Tax Tea parties that went on around the whole USA on April 15, 2009, but our President, talking through a spokesman, was totally unaware that they were happening at all till asked on April 15 in the morning, the protests were not about "just taxes", but about the amount and the purpose that the money taxed against the people and how it is put to use for by our elected - and in reality mostly appointed to make decisions by elected officials - in the government (at all levels).
If you really looked at all the taxes buried within other goods, for most people the REAL tax rate is somewhere around 40% of your gross income is being siphoned off to the Government - who in turn is doing things "for you". In reality, most of the money sent to any government is spent on someone else other than "you" - it is spent on people who the government itself has decided it does not want to tax but provide services to. That is why 50% of the people in the USA pay no Federal Income Tax - they get it all back at the end of the year or in some cases get more than what they ever paid into the system.
Lots of taxes received go to "infrastructure" and of course the military. However, the military takes up at most 30% of the total federal budget, and of that 30% , 50% of the money paid out comes right back into the tax man's coffers as income tax, business tax and other fees that the private businesses and employees pay. So the true tax cost is really less. Money used in the the other 70% of the budget, Medicaid and social security etc, is not nearly recovered as much - since those people usually fall below the tax cut-off and thus never pay income tax, or are other government agencies who do not pay thus the flow-back is cut to maybe 10% of what is paid out.
Add in sales taxes, property taxes, business taxes, transpiration taxes, and thousands of pages of other taxes, I bet that there are some people who pay 55% of their gross pay in taxes - but only really see 40% showing up as a tax on any statement to that effect.
Government is a PAID contractor in effect, you hire it to do something you COULD do, but you thought it would be cheaper to pay someone else to do it than yourself. The problem is that once you contract any function out to the modern Government, it wants to please everyone and thus it puts in lots of extra steps to ensure that it does, takes longer to accomplish it due to these steps, and no longer really allows the people to make a decision since they are now the "experts" and know better what you want done than you do. Add in the new checks and balances that they put in to make things "transparent", and you will always double or triple the cost of accomplishing anything. In private business a single person can do 5 jobs, but in the government in order to ensure that power is not abused, concentrated, bypassed, they HAVE to hire 5 people and create a process to accomplish that same task. This is really the main reason government has grown so much - they will spend a million dollars more a year in order to save $50,000 - but now that the process is transparent, don't you feel better?
