> That's really a matter of accounting.

So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?

No and yes I think a lot of people see the tax cuts as a lump sum transfer of wealth from the American public to private hands. In fact after you made this comment I found that the house.gov website says this explicitly.

The argument that taxes are part of the social contract was made by the same people who invented the concept of the social contract, of which the US constitution is famously an explicit example. So yes in general I think the people who founded the country bought the argument that creating a government required the payment of taxes necessarily as an obligation.

Do you think anyone really buys the idea that it's anything else?