[danlitt]

> look at countries where the state is both heavy on taxes and inefficient

And you accuse me of cherry picking! I have to guess, since I don't know what you regard as "inefficient", but about half of the top-ten-GDP countries are high-tax western european economies. Normalising per capita just leaves oil countries and tax havens, so I'm not sure what metric to use.

> The only thing that can save middle/low class consumers is the hope that the state won't increase taxes faster than we can save money

Do you have any evidence from history to back this up? Saving has not done the lower/middle class very much good in the last 100 years. Is there any period you can point to where living standards improved because people were saving money faster than taxes increased? Taxes were very low in the 1800s - did it enable lower class people to save money?