I’ve found most nations settle on: if you’re not making much, keep it. It means more to you. In fact, here’s a few hundred more for sales taxes you might have paid. If you’re making enough to “get by,” we’ll skim off the top and give you tax breaks as incentives. From there it’s a sliding scale up to some cut off. For example: If you’re making more than 3-5x the “getting by,” rate mentioned above, we’ll split it – you keep half, we’ll take half. And again, that’s only on top of other tax breaks, so 50% is an asymptotic upper bound for most people.

I may not like it come tax time, but it makes sense to me. I consider the half I don’t keep another sort of contribution to society. And of course look for ways to minimize it–money doesn’t save itself. But I don’t fight over the concept– I rely on services paid directly from taxpayer money each day. The one thing I would hope for is efficiency– but I don’t think starving and cutting systems inherently improves them. It’s just a shell game.