It is not the taxes we pay that are the true cost of government, but instead, the resources diverted from use elsewhere are the true cost of government.
Think of that when you read about a hair-brained idea like this. Americans (What about the Canadians and Mexicans? Aren't they, too, Americans?) should be rebated tax dollars for every day the government is shut down. For instance,
This would be simple to do. For every day the government is shut down, every American's 2013 tax bill would be reduced by one day's worth of income taxes. Here’s the math. The average family earns about $50,000 per year and pays about 12 percent of that in federal taxes. That works out to about $16 a day. Might not sound like much, but a two-week shutdown would generate a rebate of about $230. If you earn $100,000, the rebate would be close to $500. If the shutdown lasts for a month, you’d be pushing a $1000 rebate.
Since nearly all government services have neither shut down nor been eliminated (most have simply been deferred until the shutdown ends), government is still consuming resources, either now or slated for the future. Therefore, what's not leaving the coffers of the U.S. Treasury today to pay for government programs or transfers, will resume once the government shutdown ends, and retroactively for those programs and employees currently suspended. That is, grandma and government employees are going to receive their full payments for the days the government was shut down, so if you rebate taxes today, you're just going to have to increase them later.
The comments represent a trove of lunacy. Remember, the reason that Congress's approval rating as a whole is so low, yet any individual represenative's rating is so high (at least in his or her district), is because of us, not them. I want my rep to keep funding my favored program(s) using your tax dollars, but I want your rep to keep their hands out of my pocket to fund your favored program(s). As long as we expect government to provide for more and more of our wants, yet expect others to pay for it, we will never exit our current situation voluntarily. It's not necessarily about the people we elect (other than the fact that politicians have every incentive to misrepresent facts and mislead voters), but the reasons for why we elect them.