As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.

Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.

This is kind of a strange take.

Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.