The egregious-ness of taxation is seen only by the amount of money spent, not in the fashion in which it's collected. If you want lower taxes, you have to specify what things you're going to cut. (And you have to be honest about it: singling out tiny programs you disagree with doesn't even begin to cover it.)
All taxation is "double taxation". There's only a finite amount of money in the system. It just moves around. The government pays for its spending by taking a bit of it every time it moves. There's no single fair way to do that; everybody will always say that it should fall on somebody else.
Eliminating "double taxation" isn't a reasonable or useful goal. To cut taxes, you have to cut spending. And "cut spending on everybody but my priorities" isn't a useful way to think about that.
Came here to say this. Everyone wants the services taxes provide, no one wants to pay taxes.
> If you want lower taxes, you have to specify what things you're going to cut. (And you have to be honest about it: singling out tiny programs you disagree with doesn't even begin to cover it.)
I read an article saying that if the US federal government wants to cut the deficit to zero with no tax increases and avoid touching the entitlement programs (social security, medicare), they need to cut 70% of every other program. If you cut it evenly, it's 27%. 27%! Here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/06/upshot/balanc...
If you want to cut spending, bring on the detailed proposals.
You're forgetting that what we [should] optimize for is the general welfare of the population (based on human moral code). Taxes are just one way to redistribute [some] gains that are lopsidedly awarded by the market, since in certain cases we do not want winner-take-all behavior (but instead to optimize the welfare of the many).
This is a middle ground between communism and capitalism and seems to be what works best in practice. Or you could call it market socialism (though that's leaning more into socialist direction).
Unregulated, un-taxed markets do not do that. They support exploitation and extraction (at the extremes).
Forget the moral code... how long would this rich people last without the government protecting them? Should we have a free for all? That's the way you start the revolution and the rich loose their heads...
Yet how woefully it has failed to curtail growing inequality. The well off have proven for millennia they won't support the hardest hit on society. Governments have to do that.
Why should I pay sales tax? I already paid tax on the money as income tax.
Why should I pay income tax on that money? That money was already taxed through payroll taxes before the employer paid me.
Why should the employer pay payroll taxes on that money? They already paid income taxes on it.
Why should companies pay income taxes on that money? They already paid sales taxes.
You don't pay taxes on literally the serial numbers of the notes being moved, you usually pay taxes when those monies move between entities.