Taxation is the confiscation of individual life and liberty and should therefore be minimized.

"I am advocating that taxation NOT be minimized since there are things the government spends money on that are not necessary, but still accomplish an important goal." This only reiterates your previous argument that government is entitled to spend whatever it wants as long as it accomplishes a noble deed. You have still not come up with a good argument to defend such nobility at the cost bankrupting our country and its citizens. "The whole concept of any transaction is that both sides are supposed to profit." Although government is a non-profit operation, you suggest it ought to make one. To accomplish this goal, you suggest it spend money on unneeded programs. Hmm? How's that working out so far? $9 trillion in debt is the current profit your strategy has racked up. Far from a profit. Do you not believe government should cut back on wasteful spending to solve the problem, or do believe taking EVEN MORE than half of each American's earnings is the solution? The current tax rate, outrageous as it might be, is obviously not enough to provide or all the government goodies you defend. "My opponent tries to argue that many of us no longer have a natural drive to make money, since we will probably survive regardless." Close, but I only argue that we no longer have the natural life-or-death incentive to work. Many good people still have the drive to work, and do so voluntarily. They're the ones you want to penalize, remember? But if the natural incentive were still around, they would not need self-discipline to get working-- they would simply have no choice. "A government that takes 1 dollar of your freedom is better than one that takes 2 dollars of your freedom IF it is still able to perform the same functions." So if a government that takes 50% of my income is not able to produce services equivalent to a government that takes 100% of my income, the former is no better than the latter-- not even for having the decency to leave me with at least some of my earnings? Would you not agree there should at least be some arbitrary limit as to how much freedom a government can take from its citizens before it can no longer be considered moral? Do you have a percentage in mind as to how much of one's freedom he ought to be willing to forfeit for the benefit of another? Do you agree that individual freedoms hold any value at all worth protecting? You seem to be debate Marxism, while my argument is meant to pertain to the U.S. -- where a high value placed on individual liberty is already assumed. "US is in fact one of the wealthiest nations in the world. We have the highest GDP for any single country by a landslide" GDP has nothing to do with wealth. Wealth is the difference between one's assets and liabilities. We are the largest earners in the world, but since our earning pale in comparison to our spending, the net result is debt to the tune of $9 Trillion. If you had a neighbor who earned $500K per year, but spent twice that and was in debt $50 million, you would not consider him wealthy. So again, you can't spend your way to wealth. "It would be possible to use borrowing as a supplement for even a minimal budget - helping us to get even lower taxes. It would be possible to use borrowing as a supplement for even a minimal budget - helping us to get even lower taxes. " Borrowing is taxation on future earnings, nothing less. It is a way for the government to make citizens believe it is found money that they themselves will not have to repay. Borrowing is nothing more than taxation plus interest. Apparently you bought the fairytale too. You closed by once again listing a bunch of government services while pointing to their nobility as sole justification for their implementation. Your argument loses sight of two important considerations: can we afford such expenses, and at what cost to our personal liberty? Up to now our country has proved that we cannot afford current spending levels, even while our citizens are forced to hand over 50% of their earnings to the government. So I ask you, which solution respects the rights to freedom our forefathers set out to protect? Do we implement even higher taxes on our citizens or bring unnecessary spending down to a level we can afford?