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Taxes long ago stopped being the main way governments fund themselves.

If taxes were about financing the government there would just be one tax called the-cost-of-government-tax and that's it. There would be no need to tax everything you do, and at different rates and on some days but not others, but when the moon is full on tuesday you pay double except if you lived on 72nd street during 2008...

Taxes are about control, about influence, and about corruption. The loopholes are there becasue someone put them there, they are not hidden. The tax-code is so complex because someone made it that complex, someone doesn't want it to be easy.

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> Taxes long ago stopped being the main way governments fund themselves.

No they didn’t. Most governments are mostly funded by taxes.

(The rest of your post doesn’t support this thesis, but instead the thesis that funding government. operations isn’t the exclusive purpose of taxes, which I don’t think anyone would dispute, and which is orthogonal to whether governments are mainly funded by taxes.)

Most countries finance themselves with the always convenient "future-taxes" excuse, in other words, debt. It is the reason congress has to keep raising the debt ceiling, so they can keep borrowing money.

Last year, the US collected $3.42 trillion in taxes, but spent $6.55 trillion for a record deficit of $3.13 trillion. This year is projected to break that record.

https://www.thebalance.com/fy-2020-federal-budget-summary-of...

Would be worse without taxes though, no?

Since you mentioned the debt ceiling, that’s another concept that doesn’t make any sense (except as yet another thing more politics can be piled on to). It’s like first the congress votes on the size of the budget, and then separately on the size of the door that it has to fit through.

> Most countries finance themselves with the always convenient "future-taxes" excuse, in other words, debt.

No, most countries finance themselves primarily by taxes; they typically also use debt financing, especially (in relative terms) countercyclically in economic downturns.

> Last year, the US collected $3.42 trillion in taxes, but spent $6.55 trillion for a record deficit of $3.13 trillion.

So, even the best single example you could come up with is...financed primarily by taxes, even in the one year you tried to pull as a counterexample?

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