Let’s take the good old USA’s debt crisis in two steps.
Large nation states spend a lot of money on military defense and offense. That costs money. The money must eventually come from taxes. Collecting taxes requires a fair amount of work, so governments create a big bureaucracy to do it. And that costs money too. Of course governments engaged in war seldom leak the precious information as to just how much a war will cost. At the end of the day some poor stupid son of a bitch gets a tax bill for the whole thing and is totally mystified about the whole structure and process.
The market economy is wonderful right up until the time it fails. Then it needs to get bailed out for an extravagant sum. Unfortunately, the bail out gets distributed mostly to those privileged rich folks whose excesses created the failure. Once again, taxes need to be collected by a large expensive bureaucracy.
If the taxes are not collected, then there is a deficit in the government budget.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Why do people get so pissed about paying taxes for the stuff they’ve been given and grown to love and enjoy? Let’s write it off to human nature.
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