Tax Resistance 101

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources

Transcript

Hi it’s Wednesday, April 16, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Yesterday was tax day in America and odds are you aren’t angry enough about taxes in this country. A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that at least 88 of the largest corporations in the United States paid ZERO federal corporate income taxes last year despite earning over $100 BILLION DOLLARS in pre-tax income. Their effective corporate tax rate was zero. Zero dollars. For reference, the average tax rate in the US is 14.5%, meaning on average, Americans pay 14.5% of the money they earn towards federal income taxes. That number of course is an average so we’ll talk about what that means for different income earners, and debunk some annoying anti-graduated income taxation arguments I always see in my comments section along the way. This is happening in tandem with a couple other headlines I want to connect for you. One of those 88 large corporations that paid zero dollars in income tax includes Live Nation Entertainment, a company that a jury found to be an illegal monopoly this week. That jury verdict was in response to a case brought by states against Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster. This despite the fact that the federal government, which was ALSO involved in an anti-trust lawsuit against Live Nation last week decided to drop the lawsuit entirely. So the states are continuing to stand up for consumer rights but the feds have zero interest in enforcing anti-trust laws. Separately, but deeply relatedly, it’s being reported that David Ellison, the owner of Skydance Paramount which itself just conglomerated last year is set to host a dinner honoring Donald Trump while simultaneously awaiting federal approval to merge with Warner Discovery, which ITSELF is the product of a 2022 merger. So, again, the owner of a company attempting to skirt anti-trust laws and awaiting federal approval to do so is literally wining and dining the president of the united states while awaiting that decision. AND separately but VERY RELATEDLY, a new analysis by The Guardian found that major oil and gas companies are earning windfall profits to the tune of THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS PER HOUR since the start of the war with Iran. The top 100 oil and gas companies stand to make $234 BILLIoN DOLLARS by the end of the year if oil prices stay around $100 per barrel. Meanwhile countries are taking major tax losses in order to cut oil and gas taxes to help soften the blow for everyday consumers. For example, the streets of Dublin have been shut down for the last two weeks with farmers and truckers protesting the country’s taxes on gas and fuel. While oil companies are making BILLIONS off the global turmoil. Separately but RELATEDLY, the Working Families Party recently reported that the federal government took on average $4,049 dollars from taxpayers to fund the war and weapons in 2025. $1,870 of that went exclusively to defense contractors. The average pay of CEOs at these defense contracting companies in 2025 was over $24 MILLION DOLLARS each. All of this taken together paints a really stark picture. We are living in a world where we the people are being exploited for every dollar that passes through our fingers while major companies strip us of our natural resources, benefit from taxpayer funded infrastructure, universities, and more, and rob governments of their ability to provide for us. It is fucking bleak to see all of this happening while filing our tax documents, with some of us owing IN to the system or at the very least having paid in over the last year automatically through our regular paychecks. It’s maddening and it can feel so fucking perverse to be paying into a system that so clearly and blatantly violates the humanity of everyone except for the top .1%.

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This headline from NPR helped inform my reporting on this issue, “Jury finds that Live Nation acted as a monopoly and overcharged ticket buyers.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can get helpful background information on this publication in one quick glance. To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

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Okay now before I go into the idea of tax resistance, of opting not to pay your taxes, let me be very clear this is different from tax protesting wherein a person is protesting the existence of any taxes. Tax resistance stands for the idea that we’re happy to pay taxes if they go to benefit our communities and the people who need it most, instead of funding bombs that kill babies, for example. And there’s always some asshole in my comments section who hates the idea of graduated income taxes and loves to argue that it’s “not fair” to rich people that they pay 97% of all federal income taxes while the bottom 50% of income earners pays only 3% of the federal income tax burden. The rich are funding poor peoples’ and welfare queens SNAP benefits, the argument goes, why should they be expected to fund this entire system when they’ve managed to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. And then they argue that a flat across the board income tax is the only fair option. So let me just fucking address that stupidass fucking argument. First of all, the argument is based on the false assumption that rich people use the taxpayer funded “system” less than poor people. When we think of who uses “the system” we tend to look at things like SNAP benefits and social housing but the system is so much bigger than that, and rich people benefit tremendously from it. R&D at public universities, school systems to produce workers, roads and bridges for workers and transport vehicles to use, not to mention the extensive natural resources and environmental degradation a lot of their wealth relies upon. The internet itself, which most employers today rely upon in some capacity, was invented using taxpayer funded research initiatives. On top of that, some large corporations underpay their workers so those workers need food stamps even while working–the federal government subsidizes those companies by allowing them to pay their workers less and the government makes up the difference so their workers can just barely continue to exist.

But!! The asshole in my comments will argue. The top one percent (those making over $663,000) paid an average of 26.1% of their income to taxes, while the bottom 50% paid only an average of 3.7% of their income!! How is that fair!!! Well, let’s discuss what that actually looks like in practice. That means if a person earned 663,000, they paid 173,000 in taxes. So much!! But that also means that they had, leftover, 490,000 us dollars. Meanwhile, people in the bottom half of taxpayers, who make under $50,000, paid an average income tax rate of 3.7%. Now of course these averages skew the reality a bit, because someone who earned $50,000 didn’t pay a 3.7% tax rate, that percentage is being skewed downward because of the number of people in the lowest 50% who pay zero taxes because their income is so low. People earning under around $12,000 per year don’t have to pay income taxes. If you’re making $50,000 per year your effective tax rate is closer to 12%. WAY lower than the 26% tax rate of the higher income earner. That means that while our higher income earner, who made 663,000 dollars last year, paid 173,000 to federal taxes!! Meanwhile our $50,000 per year earner, at 12%, paid in only $6,000 dollars to the system!! Unfair!!! But again, these percentages don’t take the full reality into account. The high earner, after paying taxes, still has nearly half a million dollars to live on for the year. The 50,000 dollar earner, after paying taxes, has 44,000 dollars to live on for the year. People who hate taxes want you to believe that the person making 50,000 dollars per year is taking advantage of the system because of a lower effective tax rate than the person making $660,000 per year, that the person with half a million dollars to play with every year AFTER TAXES is the victim in this scenario. That things should be made equal and everyone should pay the same percentage of taxes across the board. And I guess to a certain extent, there’s only so far logic, reason, and basic human decency can take me on this argument. If a person genuinely believes that the person with 500,000 dollars left over after taxes deserves that money more than the person with $44,000 left over, that there isn’t some larger inequality going on that one person can make more money than they need and another can make so little they can barely pay for rent and food and health insurance every month, then that’s fucked up and that’s on you. But just from a practical standpoint, the likelihood that that person making $660,000 dollars availed themselves heavily of the infrastructure that taxpayer dollars built, whether through universities, through the roads and bridges and the internet that their employees use to do the work that generates the profit that they then steal, means that yes they should pay a larger percentage than the person making $50,000 per year who maybe uses the internet or drives their car on roads and maybe went to a 4 year university though they’re probably still in debt from that experience too. The stress on the system and on the environment that rich people cause through their private jets, their conspicuous over consumption, their giant mansions, their superyachts, and more, means that the burden should not be equal. If people arguing against graduated income taxes truly believe in quote unquote “fairness” then it’s only fair for higher income earners and the companies they work for to pay a higher share of their income in order to pay for the taxpayer funded initiatives they benefit from. If anything, the fact that the top 1% pays 40% of all income taxes and yet still manages to maintain their status as the wealthiest people on the planet indicates to me how cheap it is to fund the government compared to their incomes, how little they miss that money, if they pay any at all after managing to avoid taxes through various loopholes. How much of a net positive for humanity would it be if we just upped those percentages a bit more, charged them a bit more. They won’t even fucking miss it. What an easy solution. Imagine the benefits we would ALL feel, including those at the very top, if we lived in a world where the government provided the people with basic necessities for life–food, shelter, healthcare–and barred private companies from profiting off human necessities, so people could actually have the time and bandwidth to do the amazing things they want to do. So our cities and streets would be clean and walkable. So people with addiction and mental health crises could get the care they need. So people could access resources to become educated and do the things they want to do. Most people, when asked if they had all their basic needs met what would you do, probably wouldn’t say eh probably nothing. Probably be lazy. Many people would say take a damn break and get some rest because we’re all burnt out and exhausted because our literal survival depends on our ability to trade our labor for less and less cash, but ultimately the vast majority of people dream of doing amazing things that would benefit the world. And even if there are people who would choose to be lazy as fuck if they had all their needs met by the government, that is a worthy cost benefit analysis when you think of all the amazing things that never happen because people live in fear every day of having their most basic needs met. And all it would take is for the richest people to pay a few more percentage points of their income every year that they literally wouldn’t notice was gone. Even if our example rich person earning $663,000 dollars per year was taxed 10 whole percentage points more, an effective 36% tax rate, their tax burden would go from $173,000 to $239,000. And they would be left with $424,000 still to live off for the year. But someone earning probably not much more than minimum wage is willing to get into MY comments section and argue how unfair graduated income taxes are to rich people like get a fucking clue. Also in 1960, you know, back when “America was great” the highest tax rate was 91% for income over $200,000, which is equivalent to about $2 million 2026 dollars, compared to today’s highest tax rate of 37% for income over $375,000. And to compare apples and apples, in 1960, income over 32,000 which is equivalent to about $350,000 dollars today, was taxed at 75%, and it went up even from there. There was a time in this country when the income tax burden was adjusted according to what’s actually fair, and ever since those tax rates have fallen for the richest Americans, inequality has just gotten worse. I just wanted to address that because every time I bring up income taxes there’s always some clown complaining on behalf of rich people that they pay most of the federal income taxes GOOD THEY SHOULD. THEY SHOULD PAY MORE.

Okay so now that that’s settled, what happens if you owe taxes to the federal government and you don’t want to pay them because you object to how they’re being used, because you want to direct those funds instead towards the causes you wish your government actually funded? Enter the tax resistance movement. I’m plagiarizing myself a bit from a video I did in November of last year but tis the season and this stuff bares repeating as there has been a growing conversation in light of the wars in Iran and Gaza that are directly benefitting from US taxpayer dollars that are buying bombs that are killing children, there’s been a growing conversation over how do we stop this, and the answer that seems most obvious is to stop paying the taxes that are funding the system.

Okay before I get into any details please pay attention to this very important disclaimer: this is not legal advice. This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor, and I am not your lawyer. I am not advocating that you break the law, I would never do that!! I am simply stating facts for informational and entertainment purposes. Proceed at your own risk.

There are many different methods to practice tax resistance, and tax resistance has been a form of protest since the dawn of society, since taxes first became a thing. And tax resistance has played a role in toppling world orders and pushing for major structural change throughout history. From the Egyptians to the Roman, Spanish, and Aztec empires, tax resistance has helped create revolution. The United States was founded upon resistance to taxation without representation. The Boston Tea Party was a resistance against the tax on tea that symbolized the oppressive taxation from the crown that colonists abhorred. The taxation of salt has led to more than one revolution. It was the salt tax that disproportionately burdened French peasants, causing revolts that ultimately led to the French Revolution. One of Gandhi’s most famous direct actions involved marching 240 miles to the sea in order to illegally harvest sea salt, which broke British laws against production of salt outside of the British monopoly system. Gandhi also advocated for home-spun clothing that circumvented the British textile taxes. Similarly, revolution-era women in the United States made untaxed domestic cloth to avoid paying taxes on British-made cloth. One could argue, frankly, that tax resistance is a long-held American tradition.

In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest against the Fugitive Slave Act and the Mexican-American War. He was jailed for one night and then wrote On The Duty of Civil Disobedience, an essay about resistance in the face of unjust laws, which has inspired generations of resisters and revolutionaries since, so that whole arresting him thing kinda backfired. In it, he writes “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

During World War II, the relatively new income taxes were increased via defense tax stamps and other measures meant to help fund the war. In 1942, a man named Ernest Bromley refused to pay for a defense tax stamp for his car. He was arrested and held in jail for 60 days. During the Vietnam War, conscientious objectors to paying taxes that funded the war efforts grew to its largest peak in US history as the draft and increased war taxes angered many who saw the war as a pointless act of aggression that was killing innocent people and using their tax dollars to fund it all. By the early 1970s, an estimated 20,000 people were affiliated with income tax resistance groups across the country, and hundreds of thousands of people were estimated to resist paying what was called the “telephone tax” which was an additional tax levied to fund the war efforts. War tax resistance subsided after the Vietnam war, but became prevalent again in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan as nuclear rearmament and the Cold War meant more and more tax dollars went towards the US nuclear program that many people opposed. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee or NWTRCC formed in 1982 and continues working to this day, providing truly a wealth of resources to tax resisters at NWTRCC dot org. They have reported a DRAMATIC uptick in recent weeks of interest in their various tax resistance seminars.

OKAY but HOW do you do it? Well there are many different ways to practice tax resistance that are adaptable to your individual risk tolerance. They can be generally divided into two groups: legal resistance and illegal resistance.

Starting with the legal options: when you file your taxes each year, you ensure that you have exploited every legal loophole available to you, the same way billionaires do. When you do pay your taxes, you enclose along with your 1040 tax form, but not stapled to it, a letter of protest. So you’re still paying your taxes, but you are making it known that you do not approve. You can also send that letter to your elected representatives and as a letter to the editor of your local newspapers. You can leaflet and attend protests usually staged by NWTRCC on tax day to voice your opposition to the way your taxes are being spent. You can call your representatives and lobby for the Peace Tax Fund legislation that has been introduced in Congress every year since 1972 that would introduce a new conscientious objector status for taxpayers.

You can also abstain from buying things that have taxes placed on them. This can be made easier if a single symbolic tax is chosen to protest, like the telephone tax, or the tax on tea. Trump’s trade tariffs are an interesting way around this one. In the past, raising taxes to pay for foreign wars has created an easy target for protesters and angered many. By branding these tariffs as simply America taking back its power, even though that’s not how tariffs work, it means the government can cut taxes for the rich through the Big Beautiful Bill and increase taxes on the poor, because those tariffs get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and the federal government pockets billions while everyday Americans have more and more of their paychecks eaten up by higher costs of goods. But it’s not TECHNICALLY a tax, so it’s easier to deny. So a form of economic protest that is a less obvious form of tax resistance, is opting out of the system as much as possible. This is highly customizable for your needs. It could mean boycotting all major retailers and only shopping local. It can mean creating a pod with your friends or neighbors and engaging in a bartering system. A hair stylist can trade with a potter–a few haircuts in exchange for some new pottery. Becoming active on your local buy nothing group on Facebook, of which there are thousands across the country, is another way to do this. It’s hyper local and it takes advantage of the overconsumption in this country by allowing for the free exchange of goods that we’re trying to get rid of anyway all while completely disengaging with the larger economy–so long as you're not just replacing stuff by buying new stuff, etc. Some people take it a step further and decide to downsize and simplify their lives by living on less so they are paying in less to the system. This can mean purposefully living below the roughly $15,000 income requirement to file taxes. So if you make less than that, you don’t have to file taxes. Obviously easier said than done, but people do it. Another option: If you itemize your tax deductions–meaning you don’t just take the standard deduction but instead go through and itemize everything, you can give away upwards of 60% of your annual gross income to an eligible nonprofit and avoid paying any taxes on it. Meaning you control where that money goes–towards housing, food resilience, whatever you believe in–instead of giving it to the government to spend it on bombs to kill babies. This is of course easier said than done when most of us are one or two paychecks away from bankruptcy or homelessness, but I know some of you are pretty comfortable–there are leftist millionaires, believe it or not. Not me, but they exist. All of this is legal and depends entirely on each individual’s circumstances and willingness to experience maybe some slight discomfort but also the sense of freedom that comes from at least partially disengaging from a system that is so incredibly fucked and that they do not believe in.

Um another legal method that is slightly less attainable for most people but is an option nonetheless is leaving. Moving to a different country. As a US citizen you’re still required to file a tax return every year with the US, but the foreign earned income exclusion or foreign tax credit effectively lowers your tax rate in the US to zero if you earn all your money and pay taxes on it in a different country. One where, perhaps, the taxes they collect actually go towards programs you believe in.

Okay so those are the legal methods, but many of the people engage in varying levels of illegal tax resistance. Again, I’m not your lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, proceed at your own risk, I’m not advocating for anyone to specifically break any specific laws that would be so crazy. Here are just some facts.

One popular way to engage in this type of tax resistance is by engaging in “W4 Resistance." If you are an employee, your employer has you fill out a W4 at the beginning of your employment. They don’t file that, they just use that to determine your federal tax withholdings from each paycheck. Often what will happen is you fill out your W4 and the feds actually withhold MORE tax than you owe and at the end of the year when you file your taxes you get a sweet little tax return. Which is fun but it also means that you just gave the federal government a year-long 0% interest loan on money that was yours. So to avoid overpaying those taxes, or paying any taxes at all, some people will ask to update their W4 with their employers, which you can do at any time, and will go to Step 4(b) on their form and add deductions in order to zero out what they owe. So, for example, if you are a single person making 40,000 dollars per year, you would take your yearly income minus the standard deduction, which in 2025 is $15,000 for a single person or $30,000 for a married couple filing jointly. So 40,000 minus 15,000, equals 25,000 and that is the number you put in line 4(b) of your W4 as a deduction. That would essentially zero out your tax withholding from your paycheck. This is technically illegal assuming you don’t actually plan to make those deductions on your taxes because it means you’re lying to the IRS. You would still owe those taxes at the end of the year, but that gives you time to think about whether you want to pay them, you can take the money you WOULD be paying and hold it in a high interest savings account so you actually make money off it, OR some people put the money in an escrow account, often a pooled escrow account through a local organization like the ones affiliated with NWTRCC, again NWTRCC dot org, with the explicit purpose of holding the money until the federal government offers people an option to pay without their money going towards defense, and meanwhile that collective escrow account can be used to support local organizations, to support resisters who get audited or fined by the IRS, and as a means of showing that the tax resister is not simply trying to keep all the money for themselves but instead take what they WOULD be paying in taxes and use it for causes they actually believe in.

If you are self employed, you would do this by simply not paying your quarterly taxes. Some people will do this with all of the tax money they owe, some will resist by refusing to pay a small symbolic amount–ten dollars and 40 cents withheld on your 1040 tax return accompanied by a letter stating why you are underpaying, for example. Some people simply file no tax return at all. Others resist by working jobs for which they get paid in cash, and then not claiming that cash on their return, effectively showing less official income and thereby paying less to the government.

Okay but of course there are negative consequences for people who break the law while resisting taxes. And though they are serious I think they are generally overblown AGAIN THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. While the consequences can be steep, even for slight underpayment, and can include fines of up to $500 for “frivolous” filings, or interest charges and other fees and fines, up to and including garnishing wages, putting liens on property, attempting to seize property, and even jail time, which is all very scary, the frequency with which much of anything drastic happens is pretty low. The IRS has truly been painted as this scary menacing threat, the tax man, etc. But the reality is, according to NWTRCC, over the past 85 years, of the literal hundreds of thousands of war tax resisters, only 2 have ever gone to jail simply for not paying taxes. Others have gone to jail for contempt of court or lying on their tax forms. One guy was arrested in 1942 for refusing to buy a war tax stamp on his car, which I mentioned, and another guy, Tony Serra, was imprisoned in 2005 for “willful failure to pay federal income tax.” He is a lawyer, and so the general wisdom is that accountants and lawyers and other tax professionals are more at risk of getting imprisoned or heavily punished for tax resistance because it’s thought that they should “know better” and therefore their failure to pay is more willful than the average person. So your likelihood of being imprisoned is not zero but it’s also not very high.

Similarly, the frequency with which the IRS seizes property is also incredibly low. They tend to reserve property seizures as a way to make an example of exceedingly rich tax evaders, your 2013 Honda is probably pretty low on their list. According to NWTRCC, the last attempt by the IRS to seize property from a war tax resister was in 1999. Additionally, there is a HUGE portion of unpaid taxes that the IRS simply never recovers. Of the 458 billion dollars per year that are unpaid taxes, taxes that are OWED that someone is refusing to pay, the IRS only recovers about 52 billion of that chunk, or about 11% of the unpaid federal taxes. If you don’t pay a symbolic $10.40 of your tax bill, or even your entire $1500 tax bill or whatever, the cost of enforcement will most likely outweigh the money you owe them, making it far from worth their time, especially now that the IRS funding has been further gutted by DOGE. But if one million people refuse to pay that symbolic $10.40, and instead send it to an escrow account or a cause they care about, that’s $10 million dollars rerouted from killing babies back into our communities. Which is a drop in the bucket, but add onto that the feeling of satisfaction that tax resisters report feeling when they are able to take back that little bit of control makes it worth the risk for some people. So the likelihood of getting arrested or getting your property repossessed is pretty low. Wage garnishments are a real threat, though again the IRS recovers 11% of the unpaid funds, and there is a 10 year statute of limitations for them to collect, so if it’s past that 10 years they cannot collect those unpaid funds. What will happen with probably 100% certainty is you would receive a series of increasingly threatening automated letters from the IRS, which is scary but also is just a piece of paper. And then the taxes you owe would have fees and penalties put on top of them. NWTRCC estimates that the amount you owe could as much as triple with all the fees and interest added up. So if you owe $100, that could go up to $300. That’s, again, if they get around to trying to collect to begin with, which is often far more trouble than it’s worth.

Which is why groups like NWTRCC exist, which is made up of a coalition of local partners. Over the course of the last 50 years, NWTRCC has created an intricate web of support, including accountants, lawyers, and war tax resistance counselors across the country that have experience and can help guide anyone who might be interested in exploring ways to resist the regime through legal or illegal methods of tax resistance. I’ve linked to their various resources in the description and in my list of sources, also linked in the description.

Blue states are also investigating ways to engage in their own form of tax resistance. California, for example, pays BILLIONS into federal taxes while receiving less than what they pay back in the form of federal grants and services. But California itself isn’t the one paying those taxes. It is the people of California, through the income taxes withheld from their paychecks, and corporate taxes, etc. that pay into the system. And the state itself never touches that money. So states like California, as well as Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin, are looking to creative ways to try to claw back some power from the federal government. This includes withholding federal taxes from state employee paychecks and then not sending that to the federal government, which would amount to a few billion dollars. They are also considering the option of withholding repayment of grants and other payments owed by the states to the federal government. These laws have been introduced by various legislatures but as of yet have not been passed. They are also in a legal gray area. This has never been done before, and they would likely be challenged and potentially overthrown in court. But, of course, that’s exactly how the Trump regime also operates–do it first, then argue about it in court later–so many blue states are pushing to move forward with some kind of method of statewide tax resistance. If and until any of those bills move forward, it is really only us as individuals that can do anything in the form of tax resistance.

But then the central question becomes: is this enough? Is it worth the potential pain? To which I answer: no and maybe, respectively. Whether or not it’s worth the pain is entirely up to you. Like I said, many tax resisters have reported feelings of freedom and agency from taking back whatever control they can and not supporting wars they don’t believe in. Is it enough? No, of course not. The $10 dollars you don’t send to the federal government or the 40 cents in indirect tariff taxes that don’t end up in federal coffers when you refuse to spend money at Starbucks isn’t, by itself, going to topple a wanna be dictator or deconstruct the military industrial complex. The unfortunate reality that I think we’re all realizing is that there isn’t one singular act we can do to make this all stop, rebuild the integrity of our systems, and stop fascism from spreading here again in the future. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try everything we can. The reality is that this type of society-shattering regime, the kind willing to break laws, undermine centuries of norms, and do whatever it wants with impunity, at the expense of literal human life, fighting something like this takes decades of work and small, incremental changes built up over time. It takes work from all members of society interested in engaging in resistance in different and interconnected ways. And yes it even involves breaking the law, if it’s done in the name of fighting for what’s right. And it involves doing so very publicly, so if you do plan to engage in tax resistance you need to make your stance known. Which is scary. And breaking the law and facing consequences is scary. And it’s not for everyone. Most people aren’t willing to do that. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place in the resistance for people who don’t want to break the law. For some people the risk is far too great–they have small children, they’re barely getting by, whatever your reason I think it’s important not to close people out or undercut their contribution because they aren’t willing or able to do big symbolic illegal acts. There is a place for everyone and there HAS to be a place for everyone in order for a resistance to be successful, especially in a country this big and this spread out.

Some people also argue that by refusing to pay taxes, people would be playing right into the regime’s hands–they WANT to defund the government, they WANT there to be no resources so they can say ah well people aren’t paying taxes so we don’t have any money for SNAP, sorry! And it’ll just reinforce the right wing wet dream of a completely deflated government. But, like, that’s happening anyway. Whether or not someone pays their taxes, the right is going to say there’s no money for SNAP while spending billions on a war they started for no reason. They don’t need an excuse to completely dismantle the government, they’re already doing it with or without our tax dollars. One facet of building a successful resistance is building alternative institutions or shadow institutions to take the place of a crumbling regime intent on starving the people out. This includes communication networks outside of the mainstream, news and information gathering, community support systems, community safety systems, and more. Imagine the potential for building those shadow networks with the tax money being withheld from the federal government. These are the kinds of networks that could then provide support, resources, shelter, and more to the very people being targeted by the government for withholding their taxes to begin with. And beyond tax resistance, building community networks is a necessary element to building a successful resistance as well. And this is the central message I continue to drive home–there are many methods to resist a dictator, but all of them, ALL OF THEM, revolve around you building a community with your neighbors and your loved ones–a community that you can rely on for HELP, that you are not afraid of asking for help, that gives you the peace of mind that you are not alone and that you will have people to fall back on no matter what happens. That is key to surviving this.

Leeja Miller
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