Thanks for addressing my points, Popa.
1. There is usually no sales tax on food. They’re paying sales taxes when they do their non-food spending, which is most of their spending — gas, clothes, diapers, household items, etc. EITC increases their income, but it is only a small proportion of their overall income.
2. The rhetoric may go against the 1%, but in fact the top 1% pay the least taxes. Some of the richest people in the country pay hardly any taxes at all. The top 80%-98% or so of earners, though, at least those who earn salaries, do pay a proportionally larger share. But they are also benefiting in all kinds of ways from government spending — subsidies of the universities they went to (or are employed by), subsidized student loans, mortgage tax deductions, government contracts and payments, government support for medical research, high-paying government jobs, highway infrastructure so they can commute from suburbs, needlessly complex tax and other regulations that provide livelihood for many wealthy lawyers, etc.
4. It’s not stealing because it’s from general tax revenues, which everybody pays to some extent. Governments have been raising money through taxes and spending on various things (including sometimes poor relief) for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. It’s inherent to what government does.
5. Both parties have agreed on the need for at least a minimal safety net for nearly 100 years. You can’t say this is all because the dole-drunk masses have voted in the populists. It’s normal for majorities of non-dependent people to want some safety net. Nobody wants to see huge shantytowns everywhere (as they have in Latin America.)
6. Individuals don’t get to decide — that’s decided by the majoritarian political process, as limited by constitutional and legislative constraints on what the government can do. We don’t really have an alternative. There’s no reason to think we can have a functional government without taxation, or to think that a non-democratic system would better protect individual rights to property. It would be interesting if charity and welfare were purely non-state and voluntary, but that’s a pipe dream at this point.
7. Our tax system does not redistribute wealth. Wealth is assets. Instead, we give some poor people in-kind benefits (such as food and medical care) and modest amounts of cash income (such as time-limited TANFF benefits), which they immediately spend on necessities (or in the case of EITC tax “refund,” spend over the next few months on necessities). If they were amassing large bank accounts and buying houses with their government payments, maybe you could call that redistributing wealth, but that’s not happening.
“Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” Oliver Wendel Holmes.