> Our defense and war spending is very much a black hole. I'm sorry if I fight being taxed to death in regards to this.
> Not all of us have a tiny military like your country does.
I think US defense (which is really very little defense and mostly power projection) is completely bizarre. A reasonable level would be perhaps 3% GDP which would still be huge. The Swedish military is tiny, and by GDP it's a joke (around 1%). We should be spending at least 2% and I think we will pretty soon, the way things are going now.
> I'm sorry if I fight being taxed to death in regards to this.
But are you fighting taxes or arguing that money is being spent on the wrong things? I.e. are you saying "I oppose high taxes because they just get spent on X!" whereas in most countries you'd see people say "Let's spend less of the tax money on X".
> Currently my taxes pay for NASA to stop studying climate change and for the White House family to constantly vacation and live in places other than DC.
I think a lot (most western?) countries have funding for space exploration, climate research etc. I certainly pay for ESA research just like you'd pay for NASA, and we obviously have climate research etc. I think the cost of the US presidency seems like a blank check if the president himself is able to choose where to go/stay/live.
I also pay for the living and security expenses of a prime minister. They obviously are nothing like the US expenses of the same kind - but that's because I'd vote to change that if it was too high.
Now that I'm thinking about it, my (official, ceremonial) head of state is the King. So I pay for a King to live in a castle!. I don't mind doing that though. The costs are "reasonable". Any excess is immediately causing headlines and calling for a republic...
> Worse, federal taxes are just one piece of the pie for Americans.
That's not unique to the US. Obviously in every single country of the world you have administrative divisions on various levels (cantons, counties, regions, states, ...) and often several of these administrative divisions have taxation. In Sweden i'm income taxed on 3 levels (local, regionl, national). But it's deducted in one place from my paycheck so I don't notice much. The state level taxes are also used to pay our expensive EU membership which effectively makes that a fourth level, a kind of federal spending - so my tax money is for example subsidizing farmers in eastern europe.
> I think a lot of anti-tax attitudes here in the US aren't ignorance, but a protest against a corrupt system wasting money
I realize that. But it seems like an indirect and inefficient way of protesting wars and corruption! Don't starve government, change it. Vote. If voting doesn't change anything then change that (i.e. change first-past-the-post elections, gerrymandering and all those other defects - until voting actually changes things). Especially since in the US, budget cuts tend to kill things like meals on wheels before it kills foreign wars.