QUOTE : you can expect to pay roughly a 40% tax over the course of your life. 40% OF YOUR WORKING LIFE will be spent working up the money to pay taxes. Normally you would expect that 40% to go to government programs that benefit you (defense, roads, police, etc.), however, in reality 70% of that money goes to other people (in the form of welfare, food stamps, WIC, health care, etc.). Mathematically translated this means out of a 50 year career, 14 of those years are literally you being a slave to other people.