What I don't understand is (because I honestly haven't been afforded the time to sit down and think about it, also it's frustrating), why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person? Doing napkin math it seems to have gone from ~10% to ~28% for average family. These are %-based, why does it need to change? Why can't cities/towns/counties work with the money their citizens can give?

Happening in Austin, Texas recently. City cites:

- Rising cost of core services

- Weak sales tax revenue. This is the city’s second-largest revenue source, and it has slowed or dipped.

- A shrinking property tax base. Officials point to falling property values, appraisal protests, more business tax exemptions, and little new construction adding value to the tax rolls.

- Disappearing one-time money. Pandemic relief funds have run out, and federal funding cuts were anticipated.

- Rising service costs. The new budget’s highlights include $6 million more for permanent supportive housing services, $6 million more for fire overtime to keep four-person staffing, and extra EMS overtime. Employee raises and social services were also major line items.

It is frustrating... if core services are costing more, cut extracurricular services? Why would you lean so much on sales tax, seems obvious this would revert to a mean? If your budget is reliant on infinite new construction it seems a bad budget? Why is pandemic relief cuts a shock to anyone? More housing services? I'm empathetic but there's more homeless than ever before. I know it's simplifying the problem but it just feels like people are punished with permanent tax increases for governments spending more than they should... we start with a new "floor" tax rate and repeat forever? Is it going to get to the point where we work 50% of our time just to pay taxes?

In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund. This excludes the seperate schools tax which is property based. Health care costs drive up many costs in the US including all libality insurances. The second part of this tax mess comes from the excessive military budgets since the late 1970s most of our national debt as of the mid 1990s was from that waste of resources. I understand we shouldn't just cut abruptly but our spend on weapons needs to slowly decline while we fund the transfer of workers out of the military industrial complex. And there are a lot of structural accounting problems like how personal credit card and automobile financing isn't tax deductbable but leveraged buyout interest is. The tax exemption for share buybacks is another budget drain. My instinct is we need a universal national income tax along with a land tax that in some ways exempts housing up to some middle or upper middleclass level.

People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.

The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.

I don't know about Austin, but where I am the single biggest source of rising costs for the city seems to be its pension fund. Which seems to have severely underperformed the market thanks to the efforts of hedge fund managers who were all hype about dotcoms in 1999, mortgage-backed securities in 2006, cryptocurrencies in 2018, and are probably pretty excited about AI right now.