S.O.S.

Broken record time:

When asked, people will always bitch about taxes and spending anyways, no matter what. We all do it; there will always be something. In the meantime you might as well have public policies and institutions that work and let those be the "scorecard," not political grandstanding and backs of phantom bubblegum cards.

Yglesias again writes re: having effective government helps taxpayers.

One of the most unfortunate trends in American politics is the tendency of the conservative and libertarian types who are ideologically predisposed to be aware of the problems with public sector programs to be totally uninterested in actually making the public sector work better...Debates about the overall size and costliness of the public are inevitable and healthy. But what’s not healthy is to have a politics that’s completely dominated by this question to the exclusion of all others. There’s a huge difference between dollars spent on useful infrastructure and dollars spent on pointless boondoggles. There’s a big difference between dollars spent on schools that help kids learn and schools that don’t. There’s a big difference between paying the salary of a barber cartel enforcer and paying the salary of a regulator who’s preventing deadly oil spills. This stuff matters enormously, but if our overall political conversation insists on ignoring it we’re bound to get it wrong.

This zero/sum game of viewing taxes as a complete waste no matter what is pointless. Instead of having fantasies of someone one day magically removing taxes forever, a more productive thing to do would be to realize they're taking your money anyways and instead of merely waving them off "they're all scumbags!" insist that your money's used for things that are incredibly helpful to yourself and the general public.