

Your income is taxed in payroll taxes, income taxes(federal and sometimes state), and then you are taxed for buying things. That is bullshit.
Personal income shouldn’t be taxed unless you make substantially more than the cost of living. Anything over $10m should be taxed at 100% including capital gains and stock awards. If you need more motivation to succeed than $10m a year, you are a lazy parasite.
Where they need to actually tax is businesses. Tax the businesses based on profit and remove the loopholes that allow for tax avoidance abuse schemes that result in a state single digit tax percentage of profits. I would even go so far as to say that the federal taxes on businesses should only apply in interstate and international businesses and only states should be allowed to tax businesses that operate exclusively within the state’s borders.
The effects of that tax plan have obvious consequences and they are all beneficial to the people.
I think the distortion field sort of addresses that.
The machine would be hidden within the field and invisible and intangible. That of course presents the problem of ending up in a wall and also would likely mean that you would end up in the air if the ground erodes or in the ground if sediment is deposited.
The alternative is either there is a mysterious bubble that becomes a scientific curiosity or there is the machine with someone frozen inside it that is destroyed by people being people. Both have their own fun little narratives to explore.
That is all based on the assumption that the machine travels forward in time through localized dilation instead of folding spacetime, which would mean it has two methods to travel depending on it going forwards or backwards in time.