It seems evident that taxes are necessary to finance a great nation. We will not always agree on how tax monies are spent, but how can you argue that a nation the size of the US can operate without funds.
While this view of our government's finances is dominant among the population, it is almost 180 degrees in error. Taxes (and to a lesser degree, borrowing) serve many purposes to our government, but none of those include "funding" its spending.
As "users" of the nation's currency we falsely impose limitations from our personal experience with money onto our government that it doesn't have in reality. Primary among those is the requirement to "get" money before being able to spend money. This means that if the wealthy are tasked with "funding" our government they must be allowed to remain wealthy and sets up the foundation for the protection of the sources of their wealth as "job creators".
The truth is that the authority to "create" money is entirely vested in Congress by our constitution, along with a mandate to do so "for the common welfare". It is also operationally impossible for tax collections to "fund" federal spending, as one cannot collect (or borrow) what doesn't yet exist.
Much of tax avoidance is enabled by our tax code.
No, the tax code is responsible for "ALL" tax avoidance, legal or illegal. Selective enforcement of our law is quite prevalent in our tax policy on top of a false assumption that only the wealthy can fund a prosperous society. Even Bernie fell prey to this with his "false" view of using the wealthy to fund programs and benefits for the greater society. He knew the truth about government spending (his main econ advisor is one of MMT's most public advocates) and how it is funded, but chose to lie to the American people for political reasons and only reinforced that lie in doing so.
But in the mid 80’s that ratio began to shift heavily in favor of the upper income earners to the detriment of the middle class.
While this was primarily the result of Reagan's false rhetoric about "taxpayer" money that set up a class warfare that exists yet today. It also received no pushback from the opposition party that had only recently moved away from labor interests toward neoliberalism and the suburban liberal as its primary funding source.
The term "corporate Democrat" was an oxymoron prior to that since FDR's New Deal. Now it describes the greater portion of the party and serves to enable the wealthy, not "collect anything from them" except donations. There is not much to be gained by electing those who are just as dependent upon the wealthy as are Republicans, if not more so.
When you already have so much, apparently there are no bounds to your greed. It appears to be a sickness, a sickness that demands a radical cure.
You can't justify opposition to this sickness while framing the conversation in the language of the enemy, which is what you are doing when you admit our dependence upon their wealth. The best way to defeat them is to make them irrelevant to the public purpose, not give them incentive to further purchase our government to protect their wealth.
The only way to do this is to demand that our representatives act in accordance with their mandate to "coin" the money for the "common welfare" (Article 1: Section 8) regardless of its revenue position. This means admitting the reality of federal finance and the myth of "taxpayer money".
There is no "debt" that taxpayers are on the hook for, only an accurate accounting of the money supply created in the private sector by prior deficit spending. That deficit spending is required to provide payment to the private sector (every deficit of the federal government is a surplus/asset in another sector) for the real resources and labor it uses.
A "balanced" budget allows for no such payment or store of value from our commerce, or any "net" dollars that are able to retire private bank debt. We don't "fund" our government with our taxes or bond purchases. It "funds" us and our society. We need desperately to alter the distribution of that funding, but we can't do so if we don't even know how it functions and simply react emotionally to its results.
