I'm not sure that lowering those taxes is the answer. Distributing them better among income classes would certainly be appreciated, though. I think that modern society has a deeply schizophrenic relationship to the concept of "work". The mentalities which kept the machine running smoothly in previous decades are challenged as the availability, distribution and actual nature of work changes rapidly. So far, we're going with a system where fewer people work more and more people work less or not at all. This trend is masked to a certain degree by various monetary and statistical "tricks", but it's there. Trouble is, if you are a consumer society, you need consumers. For a while now, people have learned to fulfill this important role by going into debt. Not exactly a viable long term strategy, though.