&gt; You aren&#x27;t less of a citizen because you try to not pay more tax than you owe.<p>That is true for some values of &quot;citizen&quot; and &quot;owe&quot;, but not others. If you&#x27;re using the strict definitions of the laws, it&#x27;s technically true. If by citizen you mean something like, &quot;participant in a community of place&quot; and by &quot;owe&quot; you mean &quot;should fairly pay&quot; then it&#x27;s also true. But when you mix those, it can easily be false. Being a citizen in that sense is about full participation in the community, and paying is part of that.<p>This matters because of your next mistake:<p>&gt;  The exemptions for certain types of income are put there because the legislature wants to promote certain activities as beneficial to the public good.<p>This is manifestly not how laws get made in the US. Many studies indicate that US legislators are much more sensitive to the concerns of the rich than they are to anybody else. And abstract conceptions of &quot;the public good&quot; don&#x27;t vote, so they&#x27;re definitely not sensitive to those.<p>&gt;  If you think so, then donate 100% of your income to the government and live on public assistance.<p>This is just fatuous. You&#x27;re arguing with a particularly dumb straw man here. Tax policy is about finding fair ways to pay for collective action and to shape society over the long term. Believing that should work well is not equivalent to your absurd belief that anybody advocating for reasonable tax policy is in favor of the world&#x27;s dumbest communism.