FAQ

What sort of tax resister are you, anyway?

There are many ways to resist taxes, and many reasons to try. Tax resisters differ in the strategies we use, the objectives we have in mind, and the reasons why we take our stands. I resist my income tax by keeping my income low and using legitimate deductions and credits that reduce my federal income tax to zero, and I resist excise and self-​employment taxes in other ways. I do these things to reduce my complicity in a government that has lost my moral support.

Is what you’re doing legal?

The more I look at the tax law, the more I realize that all of us illegally evade taxes to some extent — not because everybody is trying to get away with something, but mostly because most of us are unaware of just how much is taxable and how much more paperwork and fees we’re legally obligated to comply with. On the other hand, even dedicated tax resisters find it difficult to avoid paying any taxes. There’s a big gray area in the middle between absolute compliance and absolute evasion. When I started this experiment, my strategy was to do things above-​board and legally, and although I was in the gray area along with everyone else, I was actually doing things more by-​the-​book than before. It’s part of my experiment to show that even if you follow the rules you still don’t have to pay income tax if it would compromise your values. In 2006, I started resisting the self-​employment tax as well. I am doing this by simply withholding payment — which isn’t legal. So I am using a combination of legal and illegal methods to resist paying taxes.

What do you mean everybody evades taxes — I pay all my taxes!

Do you pay “Use Tax” on things you mail-​order from out of state and therefore didn’t pay sales tax on (if you’re in a sales tax state, like most of us)? I didn’t even know about this tax until I started my tax resistance and did some research. This is an example of a tax that people are technically obligated to document, report and pay, but that in practice people evade out of ignorance or frustration at the paperwork.

Have you considered earning money in the underground economy and not declaring it to the IRS?

I’ve given this some thought. I think that if you can get away with earning undeclared income, it absolutely makes sense to do it. On the other hand, I think it’s worth emphasizing that tax resistance is a path that you can choose even if you want to do everything above-​board and by-​the-​book. If the right opportunity in the underground economy comes along, I’ll take it. I won’t be able to discuss it on this blog, though, because that could be used against me by the powers-​that-​be. As of the time I’m writing this, I have not earned any significant amount of undeclared income and I am still pursuing income tax resistance through legal means. This might change.

Don’t you know that you don’t have to pay income tax because wages aren’t really income and the sixteenth amendment wasn’t legally ratified and anyway it doesn’t apply to people living in states but only those who live on federal land, and all you have to do is declare yourself a sovereign citizen and buy this book?

I get a lot of advice like this, but I see a fatal flaw: The IRS and the courts are the ones who get to decide what the rules of the game are and when they can seize your property or throw you in prison, and they don’t read the same book you’re reading. They’ve pretty much decided that arguments like this won’t fly. It’s true, however, that even completely silly tax arguments often work just because it’s so much work for the IRS to unravel them. Unless there’s plenty of money involved or it’s a high-​profile case, it just isn’t worth their time. So although the logic behind these schemes have about as much to recommend them as Nigerian Scam emails and pyramid schemes, I’m glad some people have taken this on as a hobby. I think I’ll pass, though.

Do you think you’re going to enjoy a life of abject poverty?

Who said anything about abject poverty? I just want to live under the tax line. I can earn roughly $30,000 in a year, and then, by doing such things as putting some in tax-​deferred retirement accounts, some in a Health Savings Account, and maybe spending some on tuition, keep about $16,000 that I get to use to live on. Thanks to some perfectly legal, above-​board, IRS-​approved deductions and exemptions, I won’t have to pay any income tax on any of that. In 2007, the median per capita income in the United States was $26,804. Other stats I’ve seen suggest that between 90–95% of the world’s population earns less in a year than I get to spend. A billion people try to get by on less than 2% of what I earned. Fully half of the people sharing Earth with me live on less than $700 per year. I’m filthy rich! And I’m not paying taxes! It’s the American Dream! I’m not going to have to sell my body for top ramen money any time soon. I’ll be fine.

Wait a minute: You can pull in $30K without paying income tax? Legally? How does that work?

You can read my on-​line howto guide to find out how. It’s a little-​known fact that paying no federal income tax is very common in the United States. According to The Tax Foundation, about 40% of the people in the U.S. pay no federal income tax at all, including about a third of those people who file tax returns.

But you won’t really have $30K to spend — a lot of it is tied up in this and that, right?

Well, yes, to some extent. For instance, one way to make $30K income tax free is to put some of it into a tax-​deferred retirement account, some into a Health Savings Account, and spend some on college tuition. But in all of these cases, it’s still your money that you get to spend, and there are worse ways to spend your money. And because you’re not paying taxes, that $30K is a real $30K. Your dollars are full-​dollars, not clipped-​dollars. Before I embarked on tax resistance, each dollar I earned was clipped by 17½ cents by the IRS for federal income tax withholding. By eliminating the income tax, I gave myself a raise by increasing the value of every dollar I had earned and increasing my take-​home pay for every hour I had worked.

But not everybody could get those deductions, you know.

True enough — different people have different sorts of deductions they can take and different sorts of financial obligations they must meet. I don’t have a car, or children, or a chronic disease, or a mortgage, or credit card debt. I’ve got more flexibility in my finances that allows me to consider a step like this.

If I want to do tax resistance, do I have to choose between poverty and persecution?

There are also the paths of prevarication and paperwork! Seriously, though, in the field marked off by these four “P”s there’s a lot of territory. Some people who do tax resistance are persecuted relentlessly by the government, and some people deliberately provoke this sort of confrontation as part of their protest. And some resisters do move into a voluntary simplicity that seems impoverished to some people. But there are also a lot of resisters who are neither persecuted nor impoverished. There’s lots of room, lots of tactics, and lots of ways to go about it.

You may be getting out of paying federal income tax, but you still owe the payroll tax, and pay California sales tax (and maybe the state income tax), various excise taxes, etc. What about that?

There’s that gray area again. I wonder what I’d have to do to avoid paying (or owing) any taxes at all. I’d probably have to avoid money altogether, since some is lost to tax just about every time it changes hands. I couldn’t get vaccinated, since there’s an excise tax on vaccines. I couldn’t eat food that had been shipped using taxed fuel. I couldn’t drink a beer that hadn’t been home-​brewed. Sounds pretty tough. I think I’ll stick with moral impurity for the time being. I’m putting off sainthood for another day. That said, where there’s room for improvement I’m eager for suggestions. I have started homebrewing beer to avoid the excise tax on alcohol, and I do not own a car so I pay little excise tax on gasoline directly. As for the payroll tax (or in my case the self-​employment tax) I decided in 2006 to just stop paying it (illegally). We’ll see how that works out.

If you think the government is so bad, why don’t you just leave the country?

If you are just asking whether I’ve considered moving to another country as a way to live on less money, avoid support of the U.S. government, get out from under the thumb of Uncle Sam, spend my suddenly large bank of free time by traveling, and so forth — I have considered this and am considering it. If what you’re really asking is “If you hate the government so much, why don’t you leave its country” then the answer is different: I don’t believe this country belongs to the U.S. government. I don’t believe that by opposing the government, I become less invested in the place where I was born, where I grew up and where I live. In short, I think that it’s the government that’s the problem, and that if push comes to shove it’s the government that should leave the country, not the people.

Do you want just to “not support” the government, or actually to resist it in some fashion?

I think many of the protesters out on the streets with their signs and chants are fooling themselves if they think they oppose the government — their actions don’t take a nickel from the bottom line of their actual support. How to or whether to resist the government is another matter. I think that a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made. Now, finally, I have earned the right to weigh that case. Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.

Don’t you know that many brave people have fought and died so that you would have the right to espouse the tripe that is your opinion?

I’ll try to hold up my end of the bargain.

How can you reconcile withholding financial support for our federal government and continuing to derive benefit from services supplied by that same government?

I see what you’re getting at, but I think this is a sham argument. Let’s say that Al Capone sets up shop in your neighborhood and offers the standard mob protection racket deal: “We’ll make sure your home doesn’t get burned down and your kneecaps don’t get broken if you pay us $50 every week — it’s great insurance.” You grumble, but go ahead and pay, resenting it all the while. Now what if Al Capone uses some of the money you and your neighbors have been coughing up to add a new wing to the hospital, or to throw a party for returning war veterans, or to buy a truck for the volunteer fire department? Do you have to stop resenting the fact that you’re getting shaken-​down every week? Should you start feeling glad that you’re being shaken-​down? Should you feel guilty if somehow you can get out of paying? How much of your money does Al Capone have to spend on philanthropy before it becomes okay that he’s extorting it from you?

Is this site going to end up just being some shady excuse to beg money from people?

No.

Do you really think you’re going to change the government’s policies this way?

No, I don’t. The reason I chose this course of action was to stop supporting the government personally — to wash my hands of it. I had a selfish desire to live my life according to my principles, and not a more overarching agenda of regime change or reform. Which isn’t to say that I don’t want a broader change, just that this path wasn’t chosen with that goal in mind. That said, I do like to think that by writing about what I’m doing and how it’s going that I might encourage other people to try tax resistance. What if 10% of the people who are of the opinion that the war was a terrible crime or that the government is run by a bunch of crooks actually did as I’m doing and withdrew their support? Well, I don’t know what would happen, but I think it would matter more than if they all sent email to their senators or decided to vote for some politician. Tax resistance is a good exclamation point at the end of my convictions — a way of saying “and not only that, but I mean it.”

Is there an RSS / XML feed for this site?

Yes: http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/rss1.php is the RSS 1.0 feed and http://sniggle.net/Experiment/atom10.php is the Atom 1.0 feed. You can also add The Picket Line to your Bloglines subscriptions by clicking here:

Why are acronyms and abbreviations, like IRS, underlined in Picket Line RSS feeds?

I use the HTML tag <abbr> to mark abbreviations. I include the full or spelled-​out versions of the abbreviations in the “title” attribute of the tag. Some web browsers denote the presence of these tags by underlining the enclosed text, and if you hover the mouse pointer over such an underlined thing, a little pop-​up window will display the contents of that “title” attribute. You may not find this particularly useful, but people with impaired vision who use screen readers to read web pages might appreciate hearing “US” pronounced differently depending on whether it’s a capitalized version of the word “us” or an abbreviation for “United States.”

Who are all these people who are quoted in your banners? I’ve never heard of most of them. Do they endorse The Picket Line?

These banner images contain pictures of and short quotes from conscientious tax resisters of many varieties. Some, like Gandhi or Dorothy Day or Thoreau, are fairly well-​known. Others don’t have any particular fame but are just ordinary folks like you and me. That I’ve quoted them just means that they are or were a conscientious tax resister who said something pithy and whose picture I could find on the Internet. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that they do or would endorse my specific method of tax resistance, this site, or the views I espouse here.

Is there some sort of topic index to this site that I can use to find information on a particular subject?

Well, there’s something kind of like that, on the outline page. It’s organized not in alphabetical order, but in clusters of topics that kind of mirror one way the content on this site might be grouped. It’s not updated automatically, but manually whenever I get around to it, so the most recent entries may not be represented there. But it might help you find what you’re looking for.

Who is this Ishmael Gradsdovic?

He’s my imaginary friend. That’s a little bit more substantial than a nom de plume but a lot less scary than a psychotic break with reality. He tells some interesting stories, like the one about his baseball-​theorizing college friends or the time his free will disappeared. He has a telepathic, clairvoyant tapeworm who interviewed Mahatma Gandhi. Sometimes he writes letters to the editor.