The rich hate any tax because your brain rewires to overly value money in and of itself when you get rich. Inheritance is either income (tax it) or a gift (tax it over a certain amount).

None of this "I already paid taxes on it!" nonsense - you think your company didn't pay taxes on the money they earned for your paycheck?

Ultimately, taxes are just a way for the government to destroy money, to achieve certain fiscal goals: namely, making sure inflation sits where they want when balanced against created money from paying employees/contracts/benefits, and curtailing excessive accumulation of wealth.

They're not a moral force, or the government "taking" from you. There's no big bank account labeled "for the government" anywhere, they don't monitor an account balance. They create money thru spending, and destroy money thru taxing; money is a tool, not a force in itself.

Local governments (and other countries using USD, etc) don't have this. They *do* have a bank account, and their taxation is done to fill their account so they can spend on things. But countries that control their currency are a *fundamentally different beast*.

This is why talk about "national debt" is meaningless. There is no such thing as debt at that level; we didn't borrow money from anywhere. We *grew the economy*, hopefully in a good way, adding more money than we destroyed.