I had a professor a long time ago that stated that taxes are meant to keep the people broke. Then the government has control over them.
Your prof was probably referencing a 1940s era speech to congress or somesuch, iirc, by Beardsley Ruml. He came up withe the idea or mechanism of income witholding by IRS, btw.
Yup - Ruml wrote a paper entitled “Taxes for revenue are obsolete” in 1946.
What is remarkable is the number of people who seem to believe at some level that theft is wrong, but not if legislators vote on it. They basically enjoy using the power of the state as a kind of club to beat up the rest of us. There is no way out of this mess without a lot of pain. The perps, moreover, are not suddenly going to be interested in facts or logic or common sense reality. They will more likely try to effect a scorched earth kind of policy as they are utterly incapable of ever admitting their cherished delusions were just that - delusions. Subsidizing failure requires
ever increasing amounts of subsidy, which is what we’ve seen for the last 50 years. Now that “revenue streams” have collapsed it will get interesting.