While your concept of taxation is the generally accepted version, it is almost 180 degrees from reality. This is not entirely by accident, but it is also very beneficial to capital and gains from the fact that voters relate to the concept because it is how their budget process works. The federal government has an entirely different relationship to the nation’s currency and most people simply can’t wrap their heads around that.
The first priority in taxation at the federal level is driving need/acceptance of the currency it creates at will. This acceptance as a denomination for commerce and contracts is only possible as long as the government has the ability to levy and collect taxes only in its currency, enabling it to provision itself at will without needing a revenue stream. Other uses of taxation in the economy are preventing inflation and accomplishing social goals, such as limiting income inequality. Those are self-evident, so little needs to be said about them.
To the federal government, money doesn’t exist as it does in the private sector. On the government side of the balance sheet, there is no “money”, only tax credits. It is only on the private sector’s side that those tax credits become money to denominate commerce/contracts and serve as a store of value. For each “dollar” created by the government (specifically Congress) via spending into the private sector, a balancing entry is made in the government sector to satisfy the requirements of dual entry spreadsheet accounting used worldwide to track the movement of money. This entry is labeled “debt” and informs accounting of the net total of money in the economy.
Our Constitution gave a monopoly patent on the US Dollar to Congress and mandated that it use that to “coin the currency for the common welfare”. This was done to prevent Congress from becoming subjects of wealth via necessitating bond issues and encumbrance. Even when we used a gold standard to pin our currency to a fixed exchange rate, Congress could create as much currency as it wished. The first thing Congress does when funding war or disaster recovery is to suspend the mandate to match deficit spending with bond issuance.
This authority to create the currency as a no-cost commodity to control the economy means that the government never “needs” our tax money to spend. In fact, it must spend before it can collect (or borrow) its own currency back. It is more accurate to say that spending currency into the private sector “funds” taxation and bonds than the reverse. This is a direct reversal of how any other non-issuing entity relates to the currency, and this has produced the misunderstanding and controversy surrounding how the (federal) government spends and taxes.
Once we get past the false concept of our taxes “funding” the government at the federal level we can make more informed choices concerning how much it taxes. Since the world abandoned the silliness of a gold standard anything that is potentially physically available is “affordable” without the need to tax or borrow. With spending disconnected from taxation the purpose of taxation is primarily inflation control. This, however, makes moot much of the imagined control over spending the voters assume, so it isn’t discussed as it should be.
