While I certainly know people who for whatever reason fail to understand the relationship between taxes and benefits, I don't think they are really at all a significant portion of people who have taxation-related policy objections. The problem is amplified in America because of the long history of institutionalized subjugation and discrimination and the liberal use of violence both at home and abroad are taxpayer funded. Thanks to civil and administrative asset forfeiture that adds up to billions of dollars worth of cash and property seized without the government establishing a link to actual criminality that they can establish probable cause on (or for administrative forfeiture, there's no hearing at all, and they account for $500 million to $600 million a year). In a particularly galling and absurdist sort of way, Americans every day are paying for their own robberies, or paying in part for the settlement they receive after especially egregious cases manage to get past all of the legal hurdles protecting the authorities. Since most victims of what normal people would consider egregious abuse won't even get past that, we're talking about the victims of Chicago PD's systemic Holamn Square torture site and the likes, chipping in, along with their fellow citizens, while the perpetrators received pensions and when needed, covered for each other. All that are your taxpayer dollars at work. In some places, the police, with a hefty chunk of change from the Treasury and DoJ throigh "equitable sharing", are simply more incentized to use that taxpayer money to conduct more no-knock raids, because the war on drugs gets the feds involved which gets the local PD a chunk of federal funding as well. All that come directly from your tax dollars, in many cases far more than what goes into infrastructure.

Your taxx dollars pay for the carceral state, they pay for ICE raids conducted through ruses and guises ordinarily illegal but not in the administrative law context. DHS has a discretionary budget of around $50 billion a year. A similar amount is earmarked for nondiscretionary disaster relief which pretty much lost all meaning lately. Of course, the agencies bring in somme revenue as well, but that's usually even worse news. In July an IG's report fouhnd that the DEA, without legally required congressional oversight, have been profitably laundering money for the cartels for most of the past decade, and had even somehow got involved in buying a private jet that was then left off initial budget reports. Like Aliens v. Predator, whoever wins, we lose, since this is self-justifying behavior, not in the public's interest but to create reasons for their own relevance. Some degree of fraud, waste,and abuse is bound to happen in all bureaucracies, but in America the impact isn't felt evenly. Black and brown parents have to have a second talk with their kids about encounters with the police. Immigrants, documented or not, pay taxes but receive either abbreviated or absolutely no means-t4ested benefits. In spit4e of contributing to the continued survival of social security, they're literally considered second-class citizens subject to indefinite detention. Or, for about a few thousand Americans, you'll experience the exact same because that's about how many Americans get deported a year to god knows where.

And there's plenty of indicators showing that mere spending isn't really sufficient to achieve any of the goals we thought we could just throw taxpayer dollars at. HHS has a $2 trillion budget, almost half of that is used in conjunction with medicaid programs and grants, yet, neither party seems particularly happy with the status quo, not to mention that it excludes 20 million or so immigrants. And we have really convinced ourselves that money can cover up expertise and competency. American farmers are seeing their entire year's revenue coming from subsidies due to the trade war this year. For so many communities in this country, it makes perfect sense to wonder where the tax money go, since frankly it's pretty difficult to see sometimes, and what's most visible sometimes is also the most disturbing, egregious, and kafkaesque one can witness in the system. When that's the vector you interact with what your tax dollars pay for, it's perfectly logically consistent to want actual services yet not want to pay for the abuse. And we don't do public infrastructure stuff well anymore anyway. Think how long it took for the 2nd Avenue subway to go up 3 stations.