Bottoms up, jynxy!
Re: taxes. It's occurred to you, I suppose, that there's a systemic problem when wealth is distributed such that 1% of the population even CAN pay 40% of the taxes (and I dispute that number...I suspect that we're looking at raw numbers prior to any number of insane tax dodges only the hyper-wealthy can afford...but even if we're not...)? People simply aren't genetically predisposed to be capable of producing value 10,000 times greater than that of another sane, healthy adult. Note that I'm by no means a marxist...I do believe that some are more suited to lead and reap the rewards of leadership, but the balance is outrageously skewed. And government isn't the solution, it's the problem. We've painted ourselves in to a corner so rife with the potential for abuse that only the rapacious and unethical can figure the system out, then take advantage of it and complain about how they're being unduly burdened.
Just look at the positively Byzantine basement full of books known as the "federal tax code". Government has become a game you play rather than a social compact.
