It's not like Lileks is paying no taxes, he's paying less taxes. He took the money that would've gone to his tax bill and hired people to fix his stairs - creating short-term jobs. Those people had to pay taxes on their income. Fixing the stairs required materials, which means sales taxes were paid on the transactions. It also means that the people who make and sell the building materials had more work - which also translates to more taxes. Odds are the materials were delivered to his home on a truck - generating work for the truck driver, who had to pay taxes on his labor and on the fuel he consumed. In short, that money Lileks saved on his tax bill went directly into the economy to create economic activity that impacted quite a few people, and every one of them had to pay taxes as a result.

Contrast that to what would've happened had the money been taken as taxes. A high percentage would've been sucked away in bureaucratic overhead. I don't know the current figures, but I remember hearing Congressional testimony several years ago that stated approximately 80% of the money appropriated to help the poor was sucked up by bureaucratic overhead. According to the testimony, if you divided the amount of federal money allocated to help the poor by the number of poor people, it came to about $50,000 per person per year. Of course, the actual poor only got to see a tiny percentage of that amount.

Which is more efficient at actually helping people - letting people keep more of their own earnings to spend or invest as they see fit or to give it to government and hope that a miniscule percentage will come back to your community to help with the parks, roads, and all the other things you listed?

Tax rate reductions - to a point* - stimulate economic activity and have actually led to tax revenue collections increasing. This isn't just a theory, it has been proven time after time. The key is to keep the rate of spending equal to or less than the rate of revenue collection. That's the part of the equation that keeps coming up short.

*There is an obvious point where revenues would begin to decline. If the tax rate was zero percent, there would be zero revenues. If the tax rate were 100%, tax revenues would also be zero.