I'd also like tax returns to be due 2-6 weeks before elections, so the figures are fresh in voters' minds. (That's not to say I'm anti-tax necessarily, just that a tighter the linkage between "what I pay" and "what I expect" would be beneficial.)
Taxes are also hidden in various ways.
The ACA is more or less a redistributive tax charged to your health care premiums.
More than 10 percent of your salary is deducted as employer FICA contributions, but they are essentially paid by the employee in terms of salary potential.
Property taxes and municipality costs are hidden in mortgage payments and rent.
With the exception of more education, I think the only true way to get people to understand where their taxes are going would be to not auto-deduct it from their pay checks or as employer paid or bundle them in with other payments (like mortgages), but instead send them several distinct bills to be paid in-person to some representative of the beneficiary.
For example, I think defense spending would be less popular if each worker had to write a check for a few thousand dollars every six months and go deliver it in person to the local army base.
Same thing for Social Security and Medicare if young people were required to deliver a check to individual retired persons (who, would, statistically be in far better financial shape than the millennial).
Obviously, this is too absurd to be implemented.
It's a pretty crazy notion that our employers are the unpaid tax collectors of the government. This is precisely why the government fought all the movement toward 1099 contract work since then there were effectively more employers to juggle and more likely to not be able to collect as effortlessly as with few large employers.
But in the UK we do get a yearly break down of where our taxes go - just not directly before an election
