I see your point, I think it's backwards but apart from that every logical step is airtight. I am quite familiar with it.

So the way we ended up in this situation is that taxes were demonized. Everybody wants someone else to pay taxes, the middle class wants the rich to pay more, the rich I think want higher taxes on high wage earners as though earning a lot each year were the same as a great fortune (this is what Bill Gates says), the poor have really little say, but it's the same thing, they don't want to bear the burden. Nobody wants to bear the burden. Guess what? Nobody bears the burden then [1]. But that can't happen, it's unthinkable. And that means instead of taxes being a friendly system, like getting funds together with your friends to plan a surprise party for a birthday (don't argue that that isn't the exact same thing) it's a system that needs to hunt people down, catch them unawares, and always be suspicious of being cheated because that's exactly what's happening the whole time. Did you think maybe instead of paying a tax lawyer those thousands to protect you from the IRS you just said to the IRS, hey you know what here, here's the money I was going to spend on a tax lawyer, I was going to spend it on doing the math but maybe that's too expensive[2]. Instead of proving I owe nothing, maybe do that, and then pay some amount of money to them.

Spending that money on math isn't worthwhile. It's stupid anyway, the math is actually decorative, the reality is fat pigs get slaughtered. It's not because they're a bureaucracy and that's bad it's because they're the one and only bureaucracy that is holding back all kinds of demons, the only one that will be loyal to Americans, and you can't just crap out on it. It's no different than in WW2 like you said. America could totally have decided not to intervene in Europe after Pearl Harbor, and just fought Japan. It was a choice. It could have gone either way. People think it was a sure thing because it was decided by vote and the vote was very one-sided, almost unanimous. They think it's a statistics thing, like you could have predicted it. Sure.

It's about collective freedom, really. When I pay taxes that I'm not obliged to pay, and make sure the IRS gets a good margin off me, I turn my personal freedom into collective freedom. Mine and other Americans, including yours in fact. I'm putting the decisions we make together above the decisions I make alone. You have the right, but not the obligation, to do the same. You're doing your best, but I think you can do better. What you put in might even benefit a third person, an American who's reading this.

It's not actually a math problem. It's a question of sacrifice. Freedom has a price. You have to sacrifice things. Not give in to some temptations no matter how many times they ask. If you give it up, how will you get it back?

[1] If the burden goes without being borne, hell breaks loose. The military can barely afford to surrender to the enemies America very much does have. There's no entitlement spending as though that were any less unacceptable. And freedom is lost. No big deal right? Hey, maybe you can go somewhere else and become a citizen of that place, can't be any harder to become one of them than it was for them to become one of us, right?

[2] This is related to the Silva Paradox: what is the cost of solving a problem including the cost of tallying costs? The costs can be time, money, energy. It means taking the cost of accounting into account.