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THE LIMITS ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Any private enterprise, large or small, or any charity, or local government, has to balance income and expenditure. It may enter into debt but it has to be able to service its debt. It runs the risk of bankruptcy. Only the state - assuming it has control of its own currency and that this currency is not tied to a foreign currency or to a commodity such as gold - can spend without the fear of bankruptcy - so long as there are resources that are available to it for sale within the area over which it exercises sovereignty, the area that uses its currency to pay taxes.
What are the limits to the availability of its resources - which are also the limits to its ability to spend? First of course, if the resources don't exist, which was the case in Zimbabwe after its agricultural capacity had been ruined; or in Venezuela which had long (and long before the Chavez period) been dependent on its oil revenue to buy in resources from outside. Then there is also the possibility that the resources of the country are being fully absorbed by the non-governmental sector, that the economy is, so to speak, booming. This is where tax comes in. The purpose of tax isn't to finance government spending but to create a 'fiscal space' that allows government to buy the resources necessary to provide essential but non-profitmaking services at a time when those resources are being, or could be, absorbed in the non-governmental sector. It is a matter of reducing the spending power of the non-governmental sector to free up resources, not of increasing the already in principle unlimited spending power of the state sector.
Another way of putting this is that if the non-governmental sector is at full capacity and still has money to spare, the result will be increased prices - inflation - the more so if the government is seeking resources for its own purposes. Too much money chasing too few goods, as the saying goes. In that case, taxation is simply a means of taking money out of circulation. The money thus taken doesn't go to the government for spending purposes. It goes in the bin. It's a more efficient way of doing what the current monetary policy does when faced with the danger of inflation. It raises interest rates, thus making the prospect of borrowing money for investment purposes (which is the way in which at present money is released into the economy) less attractive.
But to quote the Master himself:
'For my own part I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment; since it seems likely that the fluctuations in the market estimation of different types of capital ... will be too great to be offset by any practicable changes in the rate of interest.'
(J.M.Keynes: General theory, p.164).
The fact that inflation is under control at the present time (June 2019) even though interest rates have been virtually at zero ever since the 2008 crash, is a measure of how seriously at present the economy is under-performing, which is in turn a measure of the enormity of the resources that would be available to a government that was willing to spend money and wasn't constrained by absurd notions of maintaining a 'balanced budget'.