You can never win arguments about how you define taxes. If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment. I think lawmakers and statist types far too often mistake the rationale as 'the good thing we want to do with this money' rather than 'why you as an individual need to pay yet another tax or fee that we could have funded some other way.'

I don't think taxes should be too low and don't mind paying moderate amounts of tax, but I do think the number of taxes should be as low as possible to maintain legitimacy in the population. Nobody likes to feel nickel and dimed to death, so it's better to have a small number of predictable and easy to understand taxes than an endless variety of fees that add up to what feels disproportionately burdensome for the public. Policymakers need to remember that very few of the public are economic rationalists with pocket calculator brains.