Yes, wouldn't it?

From an L. Neil Smith piece entitled "Wouldn't it be nice?" to which I found a link at Two-Four:

The first thing Americans should know is that between the federal, state, and local governments, about half of what they earn every year is taken away from them in the form of taxation. (As usual, you will find that different sources offer have different opinions about this -- the Tax Foundation tells me it's "only" 32.7 percent -- I got my original information personallly, from LeFevre, and have since been able to confirm it on other websites.) What this all means is that if you paid no taxes at all, you'd have twice as much money to save or spend.

Similarly, every individual or company from whom you buy goods or services pays about the same percentage of their income out in taxes, one way or another. However here it's just considered a cost of doing business, a cost that gets built into the prices you and I pay for everything, doubling what everything would actually cost in a tax-free society.

Without all these taxes, competition would soon drive prices down to half their current level, which means that your money (which, if you'll recall, you have twice as much of) would buy twice what it does now -- that's an effective quadrupling of what's called your "real wealth".

How can government eliminate poverty? Poverty is government's stock in trade.