Taxation Thoughts

I don't like paying taxes, and I don't know too many people that do. Especially in this country, where the taxes are up to 75% higher than those of our neighbor to the south.
It's not the actual reaming I mind overmuch, though. Heck, some people find that sort of thing pleasurable. It's that once I've been screwed out of my hard-earned money, my government sees fit to waste it. In a profligate manner, while telling me that they know best and that it's for my own good.
Bastards.
A note up front: I don't drive. (Although I co-own our family car, and let me tell you that raised some eyebrows at the dealership.) I probably never will drive: my vision is on the knife-edge of acceptable and pretty certain to worsen in the years ahead. Besides, one good song on the radio and I'd bop my way into a triple-fatal.
I don't drive, but since all our money's pooled, I do pay for gas, and more specifically for the tax on it. Fuel's running at CDN$0.92.5 a litre. About 45% of that is pure tax. I've done my bit: Harold, our little Toyota, is the most fuel-frugal thing on the road, if you discount the hybrids. In ten or twelve years, when Harold has croaked like the little green frog he is, our next car will be electric. Or hydrogen-powered. Or something. Hell, I'll make it run on my own farts, if I have to. Because by then the price of gas will be sitting up around $3.00 a liter, if not more.
I'd love to see them cut the gas tax, but at half a political promise per ten million litres of fuel, it won't happen. I can live with that--if the monies collected would go towards maintaining roads and buiding an effective public transit system. Right now about 2% of gas taxes actually go into road maintenance, and precisely 0% into public transit, as far as I know. Instead it all goes into "general revenues"--which in today's Ottawa is code for "the pockets of Liberal-friendly ad agencies". Nice, eh?
The taxes don't end there. Oh, no, not in Canada. Our city has raised property taxes an obscene 10.5 percent this year. The mayor has two excuses he calls reasons: one, the previous city council misread a contract and left itself on the hook of a whole bunch of millions of dollars; two, "reserves are depleted". Neither of these things are my problem, and I resent him MAKING them my problem. But, being Canadian, I'll just unzip and bend over.
The list of government waste goes on and on, page after page of frivolous, unnecessary spending that leaves Joe or Jill Taxpayer nauseous. Athough we've had a gun registry up here since the mid-30s, for some reason it was decided we needed another one, and this latest registry's costs are rapidly approaching two billion dollars, with not one life saved. There's been hundreds of millions of dollars (that we KNOW of) siphoned off into the aforementioned Liberal-friendly ad agencies. (In typical Liberal fashion, they're moving to kill the investigation because the heat's getting a bit too much for them to handle.) Billions of dollars have been wasted over the years on official bilingualism, official multiculuralism, senseless arts grants, corporate welfare...it is to vomit.
Our provincial government ran on a platform of "no tax cuts, but no tax hikes either". The Premier made 231 promises in that campaign, and he's working very hard to break every last one of them.
Like I said at the outset, I don't mind paying taxes, even high taxes, if I'm getting value for money. Right now, in Canada, my money has no value--it's thrown around without a care in the world.
Governments at every level have forgotten the axiom that there's only one taxpayer, and they're well on their way to forgetting another one, as well. Something about blood from stones...