Except for the part where they just make more tanks instead of give people insulin or whatever

Taxes are completely fucked. Here's why.

ALL of the wealth of a society is produced by workers - they do the mining, the harvesting, the planting, the refining, the quality assurance, the distribution, literally ALL value is produced by the workers.

The owners got togther and formed a country. Not the workers, not "the people", only owners formed and organized the country. They chose a private property regime because they now own all the wealth produced by workers. 100% of what workers produce under an employment regime is owned by the owners.

But the owners can't sell anything if the workers can't buy it. And the workers can't work unless they can support their needs. So the owners take a portion of that value they steal and give it to the workers.

Then, the government that the owners created take money from the workers in the form of income tax, sales tax, and property tax.

Then they create NGOs and spend billions of dollars (that they stole from workers, remember) to convince workers to DONATE their salaries to the NGOs to solve social ills created by the owners.

Then the owners use the government to maintain their own wealth structures and prevent the workers from threatening them. When the owners make mistakes that would cost them fortunes, they take the money from the workers taxes.

Then they realized that even with this scheme workers were able to buy and own things. So they used their government to change the rules again. Fractional reserve banking let's a bank hold 100 dollars in cash and create 900 in loans. The bank loans this magical money to workers and the workers collateralize it by giving the bank on lien on their house. The bank now has a more collateral that they can use to generate 9x loan values from, and the act of generating that money causes price inflation in housing, which increases the amount of money the banks can loan out. The net result is that workers pay rent to live in their own homes and that rent goes to the owners who control the government. When this scheme runs into issues, the owners use money taken from the workers (a portion of what was given to them after everything was stolen from them) to smooth out any hiccups and keep the scam rolling.

So, no, taxes don't make things better. Only completely dismantling capitalism and running the government for workers by workers and eliminating private property and profit will ever help the 99%. Everything else is a scam and a distraction.