Tax does not pay for government spending https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/04/29/tax-does-not-pay-for-government-spending/. Probably the biggest challenge to understanding how the economics of governments really works comes from the need to understand that governments of the sort we have in the UK are not funded by taxes. They are funded by central bank money creation. Tax exists to control inflation. Until it's appreciated that spending creates taxation and not that tax funds spending, nothing else about how the government works makes sense.
