[Qiu_Zhanxuan]

European talking but do you feel the proportion of tax being wasted has increased or decreased since the last 2 decades ? Did public service got better or worse ? Social program ? Education ? Foreign Policy ?

I always felt that America had low taxes and most of it was used to deliver the bare minimum services (police, defense, public servant, social program) or even below (public schools, teacher, justice, IRS...) what is necessary for a society to sustain itself.

[rangestransform]

Increased for sure

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....

[blackeyeblitzar]

I see tax wasting increasing. For example my local and state government spend lots of taxes on funding activist / social justice programs that are simply not wanted by most citizens but are still pushed through by dedicated extremist activists. These programs always have generic names and goals like “community building” and they achieve nothing, except handing out our hard earned money to politician’s friends (who they can count on for election support) and their political causes. Meanwhile basic government functions like policing and prosecution and education are failing.

Here’s one example among a LONG list of grifts that illustrates how reckless politically biased elected officials can be with everyone else’s money - spending millions so some activist group can run a minor survey: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-s...

Another example: here, funding for public schools has increased a huge amount - it is more than double what it was a decade ago. Our schools spend something like 20-25K USD per student per year now. But the schools are in poor physical condition, the quality of education is low, programs like music are on the chopping block, many schools are being closed to save money, the teachers and their unions are unaccountable for performance, and the school/district leaders are focused on political battles like injecting ethnic studies into math (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlin...).

The thing is government programs are generally not held to any standard of performance and accountability, and citizens don’t have much time to watch over them. Spending and budgets always go up not down, because there is always some dedicated group fighting to extract something for themselves. The leaders who are enabling all this act in ways that ensure election and re election, not good results for their citizens. And they act in favor of their personal political and ideological goals instead of being neutral. This type of “corruption” then causes many people to want to just reduce taxes because they’re not even getting the basics they thought they already pay for. I don’t have a solution, I just think it is some kind of spiral that leads to people believing taxes are wasted more as time goes on.

[neilyio]

What a place we live in where someone can see "policing and prosecuting" as "basic government functions" rather than "community building".

[Jensson]

Enforcing the law is a function that every single government needs to do, so definitely a "basic government function".