The prevalence of user fees is the direct result of the braying of the "no new taxes" crowd.
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The result is that taxation is not spread evenly, is highly capricious, is highly regressive, and very often yields perverse economic incentives.
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Taxes are at a 60 year low.   They are not yielding the revenues required to provide the public sector goods and services needed to optimise overall economic growth in our society.  
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If we want out economy to grow, taxes need to go up fairly substantially.
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How much higher?  A rough guess would be 4% - 5% of GDP higher, possibly quite a bit more.
How do we know?  Because we have a rapidly ageing population, and we are in a transition to higher density, more highly urbanised population centers, and over the next 30 - 50 years we are going to have to pay for that transition.
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The good news is that the faster we do it the sooner that  expenditure will yield a richer, more energy efficient, knowledge-based economy.