"I keep waiting for one wealthy, well-known figure to stand up and say publicly that he or she is willing to pay more in taxes as part of the shared sacrifice necessary to gain control of the country’s deficit."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/opinion/nocera-while-the-m...
By their very nature taxes are not voluntary, they're taken by force of law. Don't pay them then go to jail.
This is a stupid (but very easy) argument to make, one (of the richest)rich person says he'd be happy to pay more tax, therefor all rich people should pay more.
If he really wants to make a difference he'd be way better off spending his money on charirty, then it's not going to be entirely eaten up paying for beurocracy. THe government is not efficient AT ANYTHING.
When you pay taxes you're funding all that crap you don't agree with. Wars, funding for lobbies, paying politicians fat saleries, all those police raids on pot smokers etc. Why the hell would you want to give more to that?
Maybe true, maybe not, but totally irrelevant. Taxes solve the free rider problem. Individual charity can't.
The US's tax burden is already the lowest of the OECD countries bar Chile and Mexico. It's 30% lower than Great Britain, and half that of Denmark. And what that hides is we spend an extraordinarily large portion of that on "defense", so in terms of money spent on citizens, we're necessarily lower.
But if that's still too much governmental interference, then tax haters are able to select from a wide variety of third-world countries. I might suggest Somalia, where effective tax burden is zero. There being no effective government at all, of course.