[pandafood]

Arguing against higher taxes because they discourage people from working is like arguing against jailing people for drug offenses because it overcrowds jails. It could be right (though in the case of raising taxes, history doesn't seem to bear this out), but it's not the real reason that we shouldn't want to pay higher taxes. The reason is that they do bad stuff with our money. There's a sense in which it can be said that all of your tax money goes towards paying down interest on the national debt, but if you take a look at what that debt is for, you'll likely be unhappy. If we (the people who don't want to pay higher taxes) pretend that it's for some reason other than it is, we put ourselves at risk of being told that our made up reason is stupid.

[mquander]

People who want higher taxes don't agree that they do bad stuff, or they wouldn't want higher taxes.

[pandafood]

There are those people, and there are the people that don't know about the bad stuff. Actually, to be fair, there are also the people who know about the bad stuff but dont think lowering tax revenue is a good way to get them to stop doing the bad stuff. I think the first group of people might have a strange set of values (unless you mean that they don't think the net effect of what the government does with taxes is bad, in which case I agree with them), but it's still worth arguing about to convince the second and third groups.