Absolutely. I get a lot of value for my tax dollars. I like safe infrastructure. I like having well maintained parks, traffic lights, good schools, safe cars, safe school busses, public transportation options, libraries and well paid government employees who serve the community. Those things aren’t free, but it’s the price I pay for the standard of living that I want. And that standard of living, when supported by tax dollars, is maintained community-wide, which reduces such problems as poverty, which in turn reduces crime. It’s a pretty good deal.

People who grumble about high property taxes in good school systems also don’t seem to appreciate how much funding that school system increases their property values. Maybe they don’t have school age kids, so they think they’re not receiving any benefit, but if you dug up their house and planted it two towns over where they would pay lower taxes, their house is now worth $100k, $200k, maybe $1m less, just to save like $1k a year.

And don’t even get me started on the Live Free or Die/rugged individualist people who imagine themselves as some kind of cowboy living in the wild Wild West as they drive on roads funded by taxpayer dollars, eat meat inspected by safety inspectors, live and work in buildings and drive cars that comply with safety codes - every single thing they can do safely throughout their day is thanks to some kind of government regulation. Most of those people have never traveled to other countries that lack our kind of standards, maybe they’d appreciate what they have.

That said, I don’t think they are the majority or even close. I think most people like a government that guarantees a certain standard of living, infrastructure and safety for its citizens. The “Live Free” people who want to dismantle it are outliers and the government officials who actually vote to dismantle it do so only because they are bought and paid for by big business.

I’ve never been an angry shake-my-fist kind of idiot when it came to taxes. I live in a society and societies aren’t free. We all want to go tax-free and lean into subsistence’s homesteading? Great — until we’re invaded and are subject to authoritarian rule and now we have no dollars. Lol. Not a single American doesn’t benefit from tax-funded infrastructure, education and defense.

I just wish we’d better address the wasteful spending and maximize the punch my tax dollars make. There’s plenty of arguments that are legitimate when it comes to the bullshit that our money goes to.