I noticed you failed to talk about the exponential increase of the federal spending budgets, state spending budgets, and city spending budgets, which are the prime reason why the government always has to increase its tax of citizens.
.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing if what is in those budgets benefits taxpayers; things like schools, infrastructure, health care, scientific research, etc. benefit society because they're budget items that are used by taxpayers
here and provide the infrastructure for businesses to grow and reach their consumers. When you have close to 1/5 of all spending on health care, that's a major problem. That's not because of government, that's because of profits. When you spend $600B a year on defense, the products produced with that money do not benefit this country and aren't even used here. The bombs are all used overseas. So when they explode, they don't benefit Americans or taxpayers. That spending is done overseas. And in most cases, the production of those weapons of war aren't even requested by the DoD, but the reps in whose districts those plants are located secure money for no other reason than to keep people employed...which would make our military the largest welfare program there is. One that is almost completely without budgetary oversight. So that's where most of the "waste" in government spending goes. I live in Atlanta. We just had a section of one of the most heavily-trafficked highways in the entire country
collapse. We need every single federal dollar we can get in order to maintain the rest of the highway, so that doesn't happen again. Most federal programs are operationally stretched to their limits already. But that was by design; it's much easier to argue for the elimination of a government program if you reduce the operational funds needed to sustain it. That's the Conservative motive behind tax cuts; manufacture budget deficits that are used as an excuse to cut social spending, forcing operational cuts to the programs that undermine their effectiveness, then that diminished effectiveness is used as an excuse to sell the function off to private enterprise who profit at our expense while not providing any tangible improvement to the function itself. For the best (worst) examples of that, just look at private prisons and charter schools.
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty".
A universal basic income is not a bad idea, actually, and would be economically beneficial to a capitalist system. It would generate automatic demand and consumer spending. Finland is experimenting with a universal basic income right now. The best way to reduce poverty in our economic system is to increase wages. If you're not going to do that, and you're not going to put in price controls, then you have to manufacture demand somehow. Our economy cannot sustain itself on spending by the top.01%. Surely you agree.