Taxation is a social agreement that we as a society of people decide to pool part of all individuals' money towards
projects that will benefit everyone in short or long term.
I'm not a finance expert, but why can't there be just one tax for everything like VAT? If I buy a coffee for 1 euro I pay 20 cents VAT, if a billionaire buys a yacht for 100 mil he pays 20 mil VAT. To me that seems fair. I'm just thinking out loud here, but it seems that there are so many taxes and different stages instead of one, just so most of people wouldn't realize of how much tax they are actually paying.
Hey I didn't say that taxation was perfect :) it clearly isn't, especially nowdays when it seems that middle income class needs to carry burden of whole the country while top earners laugh all the way to their panama bank.
"We need fire departments and they would cost 30% more if only 70% of people carried fire insurance" is fine until you spend 50,000% of that amount on War in Iraq and buying votes of retirees / drug companies with unsustainably large benefits increases.
In the end you end up in the same place for the services that are actually worth having (like fire departments), because they're worth having so the majority of people buy into them and you still get economies of scale, but you get the option to decline other wasteful services that cost more than they're worth. And that puts useful pressure on individual services to be worth more than they cost.
The poor don't get out of paying it by having nominally low personal tax rates, because all the other taxes still apply to everyone. When you tax a business and it raises prices or can't give employees higher wages, that comes out of the pockets of the poor the same as everyone else, which is what makes them so poor to begin with. Remove $500 in spending of which $250 were real services, then pay $250 for the real services yourself, and the result is a $250 surplus -- which can go to the poor as much as anyone. They are, after all, the largest beneficiaries of lower unemployment (resulting in more jobs with better wages) and lower prices (because they spend more of their income).
The difference was very noticeable.
In the high taxed state, when I woke up at 7am after a heavy snowfall (read 6-10" of snow) my roads were plowed curb to curb. School buses were always running on time, the roads were clear and you were expected to be in the office.
In the low tax states, when I woke up at 7am after a heavy snowfall (read 6-10" of snow) the roads weren't plowed until late afternoon. Schools were routinely closed and you had no option but to work from home. The streets were hard to navigate since the plows just plowed around the parked cars, turning a two way street into a one way street. It was common to see cars plowed in for the Winter because the snow was plowed up over their windows. The city I lived in routinely ran out of money to pay the plow drivers so at times, the streets didn't get plowed at all later in the Winter months.
A lot of times, people reject the benefits of taxes and just see it as a money grab by the local and state governments. Once you experience the difference first hand, you can't have an appreciation of the amount of good taxes provide your local and state governments. I don't mind paying higher taxes because I know it does benefit everybody in a myriad of ways, not just the pleasant experience of having your streets plowed in a timely manner.
Just curious, if you don't mind sharing, which state is that?