[throwaway0a5e]

The problem is that there's a subset of the population that thinks taxation is inherently good and blindly goes along with the people who propose taxes for their own benefit and the people who propose taxes as a lossy way to legislate away behaviors they don't like but could never get the support for actually legislating away. The result is a baseline support for even the dumbest taxes that is too damn high. This makes bad policy seem like it has actual support when it's just the mechanism of the policy (taxes) that has support.