>All they’ve got left is fear.

This is the other path... FUD. Hold people and bay with smoke and mirrors and hope no one looks behind the curtain. 

>Sure, maybe they’ll somehow manage to pull off a massive tech upgrade and use A.I. to go after millions of citizens who are doing their best to avoid taxes, but this is after all the government, home of inefficient bureaucracies.

By the time they do, it will have evolved again, and again.

I remember when they rolled out an adult content filter to "protect children" in Australia that was to be installed at the ISP level, taking it out of the hands of end users. They spent 80+ million on the development and it took a 16 year old a handful of minutes to bypass it.