You misunderstand. Your taxes are not for infrastructure. It's for a ships and planes, guns and ammo, and interest to pay our debt. It's to cripple our enemies and intimidate our allies. It's also to keep the masses of desperate people from starvation so they do not take to the streets, but you needn't worry about that soon.
You will sacrifice more for this system you see little benefit from. You may be called to fight for it, and you may even die for it, and the people who benefit the most from all of this killing and waste will eventually lose their hold on power due to the putrid state of the system itself.
The economy we have now transcends rationality. It no longer exists to serve a function like distributing goods or developing the productive forces. Instead, its particular manifestation now is treated as dogma - eternal and unchanging. We pray for shallow declines and sharp growth like peasant farmers pray for rain. Meanwhile, we, the common people, pay for holy wars against ideological enemies. Long ago we gave up on innovation in favor of rent-seeking and parasitism, like the high priests of old.
The economy, namely free market capitalism, has become the new state religion in the west.
There was always a subsection of the population that didn't get to experience any of this opportunity. Now that slice is growing. The fact that your vapid consumerism doesn't give you pleasure makes sense since your position is more precarious today than it was yesterday. What is the point of such things when they are not permanent?
This is a simplistic point of view. The economy is a particular arrangement of productive forces. Our slavish, irrational devotion to one particular arrangement is what makes us "slaves" to it.
Naturally, power is expressed through whatever arrangement is decided upon, and therefore "manipulation" is guaranteed to benefit those with the power to change the system. Since the number of people who benefit the most, and therefore have the most power, is very small then it stands to reason that your information imbalance arrises from the exclusivity of this arrangement.
For example: the owners of retailers, restaurants, and other such businesses decided that they will not accept prolonged lockdowns. Therefore, the entire system acquiesced to their demands. Consequently, one million people died in the United States alone.
So, we are "slaves to the economy" because all of the decisions are made for the benefit of the ~2% of people who own a business. Those who were allowed to isolate, such as tech workers and such, just let this happen without anything more than a "tsk tsk", and that was because ultimately those people wanted a coffee delivered to their front door and 10% gains on their portfolio (yes, I hate my co-workers). Self interested people enabled by a comfortable, morally bankrupt middle class that tosses the working poor to the wolves for a chance to sell their carcass - that is "the economy"
Now, "the economy" said recently that this middle class can go stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and forget about work from home. Guess this allegiance to "the economy" really did get us nowhere, huh?
What you are noticing is the irrational worship of free markets by the middle and upper classes. The mantra, repeated ad nauseam by the entire American/European establishment, is that somehow private industry and free markets are inherently morally good. The Economy, or at least this particular expression of it, has replaced religion. Its high priests, like in antiquity, dictate the fates in their white marble temples.
You will sacrifice more for this system you see little benefit from. You may be called to fight for it, and you may even die for it, and the people who benefit the most from all of this killing and waste will eventually lose their hold on power due to the putrid state of the system itself.