Were they? I'm pretty sure taxes have been going down for decades.

Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1]

[1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...

And property taxes and fuel taxes, which pay for most of the stuff under consideration, have only gone up. In some cases, way up.

I grew up in California. You could see when Prop 13 capped property taxes in things like schools or libraries: everything built before it was nice but falling apart, everything built after it was designed to be cheap to build. They could try to bridge the gap with bonds but that was unreliable.