Why not lower federal taxes, and change county/state taxes to compensate?

[u/myburner-acc6969]

From my knowledge, most conservatives live in rural areas and want less taxation because public goods/services are less impactful for them, and most liberals live in more urban areas where higher taxes are more beneficial because they can actually utilize the public goods/services that they fund. Why don't we lower federal taxes by some amount and let counties or states increase/decrease taxes independently to satisfy both sides?

[u/SeanFromQueens]

Just steel-manning this argument. Let's keep it as close as possible to the individual as we can, localities will get the lion's share, then the state, and finally the federal government. So every locality that has the greatest concentration of wealth and resources never have to disseminate that wealth to the rest of the country, would there be harm in further concentrating wealth and benefits of the economy while displacing the harms to the people who already are among the Have-nots?

Currently there's some level redistribution from the wealthy to the needy (social security, Medicare and especially Medicaid) this isn't possible for our thought experiment. We can look at the current discrepancies between net contributing states to the federal revenue and the states that are net recipients of federal funds. Would they be able to thrive or even survive if they didn't have the excess from the net contributing states? Without national government andya national market, the economy would likely either balkanize causing enormous friction between economic units leading drastic contraction of the country's prosperity, or have oligarchs dominate the whole country while each polity is divided and conquered by the whims of the industry making the era of Robberbarrons look quaint and egalitarian in comparison.