Gadol,
“rich” people pay most of the taxes, what is the argument that they should pay even more?
Even proportional taxation is not so clear from the first principles: yes, rich may get proportional benefits from the government in, say, protecting their property, but in other aspects – say, voting, medical insurances, the benefits are the same for everyone, so “fair” taxation should be proportional or less.
So, after you skip the intentional lie of “free stuff” for poor, then you can see that reducing taxes is supporting your expressed desire to stop extra spending. The argument that probably comes from Goldwater to Reagan is to “starve the beast”: it is difficult to get rid of a specific program because there are specific beneficiaries – people with bad teeth; missile makers; etc – but there are no particular objections from the taxpayers, as each program is “only $10 per person”… So, the creative solution is to reduce collections to make it harder to spend. Results in a debt? well, the alternative would be to collect more taxes and then increase spending to whatever is possible, leading to a similar debt … for example, pre-Obama debt-to-GDP was 86% just slightly higher than France 70+ and Germany 60%. Obama broke through the Reagan’s trick by increasing spending despite the debt making the ratio 138%, France did similarly, but Germany stayed at 75% (cheap Russian gas and exports to China).
There is nothing new here – Gemora calls government “wailing poor” because they always ask for more.