Ok professor. That was exactly your point, but appearently you are so brilliant and you and the rest of the authoritarian statists are so full of esoteric, macroeconomic knowledge you can't define the word "fungible". I promise to use smaller words in the future. The concepts I'm talking about are very simple, and the core principals of our Declaration of Independence (natural law), and our now corrupted Constitution.
The point is not that all tax revenue ultimately comes from citizens. This is simple, primary truth, and irrelevant as to the mechanism from which government revenue is derived. It is what that mechanism is attached to that actually matters. Is it naked force and stealing the fruits of your labor at gunpoint, or is there a choice involved?
If I'm going to go buy a new boat, and the government slaps a 50% luxury tax on that boat I can choose not to buy it and not to pay the tax. Most people would refuse to pay that, and very few boats would get sold, and if the government wanted to make more money they would have to reduce the tax to a level that people would pay. If the government is going to rob me by force nothing matters except that I have something for them to rob. They are not bound by any sort of normal market force, or even to produce a good economy with citizens who are getting wealthier. It is crystal clear to a majority of people here, though maybe not at the university at which you are appearently an economics professor (Boston U?, Ocasio Cortex alma matter?) that plebiscite is not even remotely a sufficient check on government power to maintain liberty.
Their "revenue" must be directly tied to choice and liberty, not in contravention of it. The Supreme Court was crystal clear that the Federal Income Tax was 100% unconstitutional up until the progressives (sort of) passed the 16th Amendment, and a gigantic check on government power, balanced by their ability to have tariffs, and consumption taxes (taxing commerce), but again within the constructs of finding the ideal tax level and not whatever they decide they want.
The income tax fuels every vice of government, and kills every virtue. It is why we have had explosive growth of government at the expense of the nation from the moment it was passed and growing geometrically. It is literally what allows government to be completely unaccountable for monetary policy, allowing a private bank outside the Treasury Department to dictate American monetary policy, and for taxes to raise ever higher as the government absorbs sector after sector of the private economy.
No government that uses force on their own people, unless for a crime, is a good and just one. No government that is unaccountable to the people, and who steals the cream from their labors is a just one. Our government has been fundamentally corrupted, and the 16th Amendment is at the heart of that corruption. The gigantic, central pillar of our Constitution was demolished in 1913, but it took a hundred years for the full measure of that betrayal and massive check on government power to metastasize to the point where the federal government became, as a wise man put it, "Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." It is the income tax that allows the government to simply not care how we're all doing in a semi-free economy, and just to take whatever they want.
I'll add that the Republicans have been terrible champions for tax payers, to the point where we are now outnumbered. Worrying about whose ox is getting gored, and who is getting over misses the point. The income tax is antithetical to the founding principals of the USA, and it's absence is a check on government power that must be restored if we are to survive.
