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Consumers not spending...

“And that's why the economy is having so much trouble.”

I do give him credit for mentioning the waste and the failed keynesian communism... he should have named it for what it is but... with that one sentence... o’bloviator excuses all of the decades of deficit spending and the open marxism of the left and the incrementalism that has brought us to the brink of collapse worldwide. Consumers are not spending... that is simply a symptom of the disease... IT IS NOT THAT SYMPTOM THAT IS KILLING US... IT IS THE CANCER OF THE COMMUNIST DREAM!

Our taxes are so high because of... redistribution programs of welfare (20 million flavors of that in America today) and ponzi schemes like socialist security... that allow the government to collect insane amounts of money from workers... promise that money back to them when they retire... plus a lot of other peoples money thrown in... and then allows them to spend that money today on socialist programs and green pipe dreams and corrupt slush funds for supporters... and at the end of the day... they have to borrow money from our enemies (chicoms) to finance the programs that they collected the money for in the first place... wake up bill... it may be too late to save America but you should have watch the destruction of America that you helped to bring about.

LLS

Good post, but I think there is a more nuanced and complicated reason why taxes are so high. Sure, it's a matter of "redistribution" when it comes to Marxists who find their way into government institutions and impose their ideology on us. But why do taxes remain high even when allegedly "conservative" leaders are in office?

The answer, I think, is that we have constructed a massive, complex economic system that simply relies on these unseen institutions (governments and others) to mask the fact that our high standard of living is largely an illusion. And what I mean by that is that in recent decades we have come to rely increasingly on GDP growth that isn't "real" at all. Instead, it is based on growth of business activity that has replaced personal "non-financial" activity (like schools and day care centers replacing parents for raising children) or entire industries built on the idea of third-party payment as the norm (health care and education, for example).