Comment by parineum

You have no idea how much you've gotten for each $1 of tax you paid, as you've never spent enough time trying to properly quantify it, to the extent that's even possible.

Have you actually accounted for all the services you’re receiving from the government? Road construction and maintenance, schools, availability of clean water, safe aviation, trustworthy financial markets, public universities, funding for research that improves your health and happiness, and so on? I don’t think you can even really put a price on most of those, because they simply could not exist without a centralized system funded by taxes.

Money is fungible, but there are various government expenditures that generate positive returns, either in direct revenue (e.g. tax collection enforcement) or knock-off economic benefits (e.g. libraries) some proportion of your taxes go to these services where you are effectively getting more back than what you’ve paid for these services.

(Economically, governments should spend more on such services until the marginal returns are no longer positive, but tend not to for political reasons.)

What “service” do you think you get from the ads you pay for?