But people don’t realize this because, like Roberts’s hypothetical child encountering the tax system for the first time in Monopoly, they only see the tax side of the equation. Leaving aside poverty programs (since those do only affect a minority), they forget about Medicare (“keep the government away from my Medicare”), subsidized student loans, national security, police and fire services, public schools, roads, consumer product testing, clean water, parks, unemployment insurance (the middle class lose their jobs, too), the invasion of Iraq (which was wildly popular back in the day), bailouts of the financial system, and all the other things they get from the government. (If you count tax expenditures as spending, the list gets longer, and includes the mortgage interest tax deduction, the 401(k) deduction, and the employer health insurance exclusion–all of which disproportionately favor the wealthy.)
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