The money has to come from somewhere, or else programs (and teachers, police, and fire department are in this list of affected programs) won't be able to continue as they have.
Be realistic - everyone who previously received money from income tax will be fighting to continue to receive that money. "Lucrative employee pensions" and "government waste" are not going to just go away because you've cut funding.
If the question was "should we abolish income tax and replace it with ____" (heh, maybe we could replace these questions with madlibs instead), then I might consider it. Otherwise, it's reckless.

It seems cost ineffective to have two routes for the finished product to take - it's more likely that, at the last possible moment, they either put it on record, cd, or mp3...

You could fire up Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) and have a look at your mp3 collection ... The "2000" image above will be closest to the overly loud mp3. You might even find BLOCKS of audio wavform, where it's clipped so bad that the top & bottom of the image (the wavform) are flat lines.

It's also a big factor in why, if you listen to this music for a while (even at relatively OK volume levels), your ears get tired and you need to turn off the music for a while in order to recover...