How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → how is tax law/policy/administration changing? → “tax reform” → radical tax reform / the “Fair Tax”

A lot of pixels have been wasted in recent weeks over a proposal to “eliminate the IRS” and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax. Now it’s my turn.

The fuss started when House Speaker Dennis Hastert released a book (Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics) in which he advocated eliminating the IRS and enacting a flat tax, value-added tax or national sales tax. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was already on-record supporting a national sales tax. This led to speculation that the Republicans would put such a proposal prominently in their legislative agenda in .

Soon after this news came out, at one of Dubya’s carefully-scripted and -vetted campaign appearances, an “average citizen like yourself” got up and asked Dubya a barely-coherent question about H.R. 25. Dubya was ready, and replied with an answer that was vague enough to leave him plenty of room for plausible deniability, but specific enough to send an encouraging message to national sales tax advocates:

Q (Inaudible) — I want you to take up, and it’s to make the world — that’s HR25 — (inaudible.) (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: All right, thank you. He’s talking about getting rid of the current tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax. It’s in interesting idea. You know, I’m not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it’s the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously. You know, we’re working to try to simplify the code. It is, no question, complex. The more simple it is the better it is for the American people. That’s certainly one idea. That’s an interesting idea that we ought to explore.

And the Senator and I — we’ll grill old Miller here on the bus to see if he can explain it all to us. (Laughter.)

(“Miller” is U.S. Representative Jeff Miller of Florida, a sponsor of H.R. 25.) Neal Boortz claims that Vice President Dick Cheney and Commerce Secretary Don Evans are supporters of the plan also.

John Kerry quickly ridiculed the national sales tax plan, and the Dubya campaign soon backed away from the idea, but Dubya’s campaign accomplished what it set out to do, which was to signal to the promoters of this idea that Dubya is open to it and, if the stars are right, someday, maybe, he might enact it into law.

Fat chance, but such flimsy things as these are what dreams are made of, and dreamers vote. And the Iraq War and the Medicare legislation show that this government is bold enough to screw things up on the biggest scale, so perhaps this isn’t so far-fetched after all.

H.R. 25 would repeal the federal income tax (individual and corporate), the payroll tax (FICA), and the estate and gift taxes. It would replace these with a national sales tax. (A competing bill is similar but keeps the payroll tax in place.)

Proponents of the plan suggest that the resulting sales tax would be in the 30% range, although they frequently use a weird sleight-of-hand to claim that it’s really more like 23%. If you buy a $1.00 bottle of apple juice and pay 30¢ in taxes — you think you’ve paid a 30% tax on your apple juice, don’t you? Well, the number-fudgers say that because what you spent represents $1.30 in earnings, only 30¢ of which was taxed away, your real tax rate is .30 ÷ 1.30 ≈ 23%. Keep this in mind when you hear national sales tax promoters tell you what the tax rate will be — they may not be talking about what you think they’re talking about.

Some critics say that a 30% sales tax is nowhere near enough to raise as much money as the taxes it replaces, and that the sales tax rate would have to be upwards of 60%.

But the total cost of things wouldn’t go up quite this much because the pre-tax cost of goods and services would drop under this plan (since the people who produce those goods and services won’t have to pay income tax or payroll tax, and will presumably pass on this savings to their customers). How much? It’s hard to say — the “wisdom of the market” will decide on a case-by-case basis, and all of the mathematical models are just guesswork operating in a very chaotic system. But certainly there would be some drop in pre-tax prices.

One of the first criticisms that national sales tax promoters hear is that such a tax will be “regressive” when compared to the income tax — that is, it will hit poor people harder, because they spend a higher percentage of their money and a sales tax taxes expenditures, not income or savings.

The proponents of a national sales tax respond to this in three ways: One way is to engineer some progressivity into their tax proposal by giving everybody a rebate: “every taxpayer in this country will receive a check to cover the taxes you would be expected to pay on essential items. I heard one estimate of how much this check could be. For a family of 4 it would be considered that they would receive around $400+ per month. This is based on the poverty level of $25,000 per year times the sales tax rate of 23% which equals about $5700. Divide this by 12 to come up with about $470 that they would receive per month.” The second way is to note that a rich person who earns no income but just lives off of his or her savings is currently not taxed at all — under a national sales tax, that person would be taxed. Finally, they note that while the federal income tax is more-or-less progressive, the payroll tax (FICA) is regressive and it too would be eliminated by the national sales tax.

(The proponents of a national sales tax are usually also opponents of big government. I have a hard time imagining a small, limited government that writes a check to every American head-of-household every month. And imagine the campaign-season bidding wars over who will increase this monthly freebie the most! Note also that this “prebate” amount is based on the poverty level for the type of household, so that a married couple would get significantly less than two single people who are roommates. Talk about a marriage penalty!)

Under the proposed national sales tax, only the final retail sale of an item would be taxed. In this way taxes would not cascade — in other words, a car manufacturer wouldn’t be taxed for buying tires and paint and car stereo parts, but only the eventual seller of the car would be taxed on the car as a whole when it is sold to the person who drives it off the lot. Used items would not be taxed, so, for instance, the person who bought the car and paid the tax on it would not have to pay tax if he turned around and sold it to someone else as a used car.

National sales tax promoters promise that the tax will be a simple one, but I think they’re using wishful thinking when they say things like: “Exemptions are the work of special interests and their Gucci-shod lobbyists. The FairTax has no exemptions…” Sure it doesn’t have any exemptions now when it’s just an unamended bill on some congressman’s desk. But if it gets closer to being law, you can bet that it will get more and more complicated.

“What do you mean the tax is the same for bibles as it is for pornography? Are you saying that someone buying good, wholesome Iowa corn has to pay the same tax as someone who buys French wine? A poor family pays the same sales tax on baby food that a rich bachelor spends on his sports car?” and before you can say “Gucci-shod lobbyists,” there are a thousand pages of regulations describing which sales tax rates apply to which items.

And then there are little complications like this one:

Consider a 65-year-old who retires the day that a sales tax takes effect. While she worked, her income exceeded her consumption and she paid income taxes. Now in retirement — when her consumption will exceed income — she will be asked to pay consumption taxes… Giving such people tax relief on their accumulated assets would raise the sales tax rate considerably and reduce growth, but not giving tax relief seems unfair. Politically, some sort of relief seems almost a certainty.

Many states have simplified income tax forms that push off some of their complexity on the federal tax system (for instance, my California income tax form starts by asking me to fill in the Adjusted Gross Income value from my federal tax form). Because of this, if the federal income tax is eliminated, state income tax laws will have to absorb all of this complexity. For this reason, some conclude that the states would be likely to follow the federal lead and eliminate their income taxes in favor of sales taxes as well.

If you combine the state and federal sales tax rates, you end up with a pretty significant number — significant enough that tax evasion starts to look like a pretty profitable activity. The relative prices of things (like narcotics) that are already in the underground economy drop (without cutting into the profits at all — so for a drug dealer it’s like being able to offer a big price cut that costs you nothing), and anything else you purchase in the underground economy you can expect to buy at a large discount. Suddenly new big-ticket items start falling off the back of trucks en masse and appearing for sale at “used” goods retailers.

Who’s going to stop this rampant tax evasion? Hard to say, since the national sales tax promoters promise to eliminate the IRS in one fell swoop.

So the underground economy is one way tax avoiders like myself would be able to work such a system. The other way is simply to keep expenditures low. I’d be able to earn as much as I’d like to (tax-free) in such a system, and as long as I didn’t spend much (on new items in the above-ground economy) I’d be draining the government with my monthly “prebate” check without giving back. So, as Dubya likes to say, “Bring It On!”

Dubya has decided to continue to hint that he’s aiming to implement “fundamental tax reform” — a flat income tax or a national sales tax, for instance. But he is doing it in the most vague and deniable ways (he’s only really promising to create a panel that will advise and report to the Secretary of the Treasury who will recommend things to him), so I’m interpreting this as more of a fillip to one flat-tax-obsessed section of his base than an indication of what his actual policies would be in a second term.

Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman tear into the “Fair Tax” proposal — legislation that would replace the U.S. federal income tax, payroll tax, and estate tax with a national sales tax:

We believe it’s UnFair, dangerous, and a disaster in the making. You think nothing could be worse than the graduated income tax? We can virtually guarantee you that, after five years of the FairTax, you’d be looking back with nostalgia on the days when Americans had to put up only with the IRS and the income tax.

They’re also kind enough to quote me as “an alert critic” and fellow-skeptic.

More hints as to possible tax policy changes, this time from Dubya Squad economist Kristin J. Forbes, who says that the administration is leaning toward advocating more “consumption tax” and less “income tax.”

But before you panic at visions of national sales taxes or value-added taxes, read this:

Forbes would not reveal what kind of consumption tax might be most enticing to the administration. She said the current system could be tilted more toward a consumption tax simply by increasing tax-preferred savings vehicles.

For several years in a row, the administration has proposed creating a short-term savings vehicle and consolidating and strengthening current retirement savings accounts. Forbes said the administration is hoping the tax reform panel breathes new life into those proposals.

That would be good news for folks who are doing what I’ve been doing. Such tax-free savings vehicles, when combined with a low-expense lifestyle, are the key to living the good life and retiring early while keeping the blood off your hands and the auditor from your door.

reports and media mentions of war tax resistance are coming in from across the country:

And in other news:

In much of Europe, and some other places, the value-added-tax — a tax that is applied to the price of the sale of goods — is a major source of funding for the government. This tax, like sales taxes in many of the United States, is collected from the consumer at the time of the sale by being wrapped into the price of the goods sold, and then is remitted by the seller to the government.

This makes it hard for individual tax resisters to resist these taxes directly. One reason I have heard for why tax resistance is less prominent in the “conscientious objection to military taxation” movements in Europe (where promoting varieties of “peace tax fund”-style governmental accommodation for such objectors is more common) is that objectors there have less opportunity to simply refuse to pay, because they are never asked simply to write a check but instead the government squeezes the money from them in dribs and drabs.

Mainstream people who talk seriously and with some expertise about federal taxes and budget shenanigans in the United States frequently daydream about shifting our largely income- and wage-tax-based system to a consumption-tax system like the value-added-tax. There would be enormous political hurdles involved in making that happen, but push may indeed come to shove some day.

For that and other reasons I was curious as to whether tax resisters in countries with a value-added-tax had come up with any plans for confronting it. Here is an example I found, from a left-wing anarchist, not in Europe, but somewhere in South America. It’s pretty vague on details or examples, but shows some of the thinking on the subject (semi-competent translation mine):

Contraband as a Strategy of Tax Avoidance

Anarchist action against indirect taxes.

On a previous occasion was discussed tax resistance as an anarchist action that aims to prevent the state from monopolizing the collective budget. But being mindful of the limitation of the aforementioned, it was understood that it only spoke of this strategy as possible to apply to those taxes that people must pay voluntarily, that is to say those that are known as direct taxes. But that which remains to be covered are those known as indirect, which impact our pocketbooks as much or more, extracted in a more shameless and silent form. To be more clear, the direct taxes are those for which we fill in forms that we provide to the tax collector, while the indirect do not have to wait in such a line (that we make), but are collected by being included in the price of goods.

And what type of goods are those that carry this tax? It depends on how cynical the current government is, but basically almost anything has, at the present anyway, a value-added tax known as VAT. True enough, various populist governments decided to wash their consciences by leaving some goods in your shopping cart out of this tax, but do we realize how very many are not exempt? But that’s not all. At the same time before you buy another tax is marked up: the tax on wages — have you seen how much is deducted from your paycheck each month? These and other taxes, whose names only accountants understand, are precisely those that take from us without even asking and that are technically outside of our power to evade.

The practical, mathematical consequences of these taxes is ironic, because we are paying for the real value produced by the workers, but the extra profit — stolen — remains with the employers of these workers, with a new profit that is kept by the state; in this way the product increases its value not only exponentially but by it they, the employers and bureaucrats, manage to live well and parasitically off of the worker, who is its real creator. While we think that this happens only with goods, it also happens with various services — maybe our time spent when we work in an internet cafe is recognized with the meager salary we obtain, while the boss, sitting on his bum, comes by every night to collect the rest of the profit? Very well, but it is not only him who bums it: also presidents, senators, and bureaucrats at all levels live off or your work (your work? does it suit you?)

More irritating still is the deduction that they make for us in the same salary when, because the government said so, 5%, 10%, and even more is subtracted from your check long before you cash it. And us, hoping for health and education, but all that comes is cronyism and corruption. And we could go on about what they deduct from us when we use public transit, and their famous fuel taxes, or when we pay the entrance to some amusement. Each and every one of these occasions they are squeezing our pocketbook, and we do nothing about it.

Enough already; if with direct taxes we can [resist], the indirect taxes cannot beat us. First, we have to continue demystifying them. These taxes are not natural, much less necessary, but are the base material that feeds that state that controls us. Moreover, despite what they tell us, they can never be the only or the major way to fund the public works and tasks — for that we have autonomous self-government, mutual aid and horizontalidad, and while it may seem like rewarmed romantic anarchist rhetoric of the last century, the reality is that today more than ever we can realize these values.

To do away with indirect taxation can be done by dealing directly with the producers of what we consume, going to find them before they become supermarket or multinational profiteers of their products, creating horizontal networks between consumer groups and workers, not mediated by speculators, that allow a dialogue to be established in the relationship beyond that which can operate in the “laws of the marketplace.” At first it can be done with small producers, and gradually go looking for more. Though we should not kid ourselves, if we do not seek as workers to take ownership of the factories, the power of exchange will always be held by the owning class.

Still, this possibility is a great way of demonstrating to the workers that to give money to the government is unnecessary, and also that they must not take it away from us, and neither should we let it be so easy for them to collect. To propose tax avoidance is not so unrealistic. The partnership of consumers and producers is the way out.

But there is something better: a certainly effective practice that they also have demonized, but now we can make of it an ethical and political opportunity: According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the definition is: Trade or production of goods prohibited by law to individuals, and the word can be no other: Contraband. This is precisely the opportunity of inflicting damage on the state by reducing taxes, maintaining consumption without tax. While contraband is normally illegal smuggling of merchandise from outside which are not worth it for us to buy, it also is to cheat the edicts [bandos] of the government, to go against [contra] the law, to make and promote Contraband [contrabandos].

Contraband is the way of producing and exchanging without taxation materializing in-between, and this can be done by coming to agreement with the producers, but also promoting autonomously self-managed enterprises that sell directly without intermediaries. Another alternative is to encourage the informal sector, that is not in hiring, but in registration with the state. If there is no registration with the state, neither should there be taxation, and this would permit prices to fall steadily. Contraband is not only a form of struggle against capital, it’s a lesson in generating social relations that are not mediated by written law but by the agreement between those involved. It is to open paths of respectful consensus between consumers and producers, and is just as respectful to allow for disagreement. It is to create a market without tariffs, without restrictions of access beyond the necessities and capacities of everyone.

To create a world without taxes is possible, and is as easy as beginning to conspire among ourselves as equals.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • In some countries, a value added tax is a major source of government revenue, and there are periodic calls (for instance the so-called FairTax) for something similar in the U.S. For this reason, I like to keep my eyes peeled for news about value added tax evasion and resistance strategies. The Telegraph reports that VAT evasion “has exploded” in Great Britain in recent years. It attributes half of this to “professional fraudsters” and half to “general non-compliance and deliberate evasion by legitimate businesses.” Organized evaders use a technique known as “missing trader” to avoid paying this tax to the government, or, in the case of the “carousel” variety of the scheme, to double the gains by applying for tax refunds on taxes that were never paid in the first place.
  • All of the thunder and lightning about taxes and the “fiscal cliff” recently resulted in a major tax bill that ended up being so much about reestablishing the status quo that I’ve had little to say about it here. The major effect on folks like me who are trying to stay below the income tax line is that our payroll and/or self-employment taxes are going back up to where they were a couple of years ago. If you’d like to investigate further and see if there have been any tweaks to your favorite deductions or credits, take a look at the report Tax Provisions in the American Taxpayer Relief Act of from the Tax Policy Center.
  • The Mackinac Center for Public Policy compares the reported tobacco smoking rate in various states with tobacco sales in those states, and how this comparison changes as the tobacco tax rates change in those states and in neighboring states, to estimate how tobacco taxes contribute to tobacco smuggling. Some states, the Center says, have raised their tobacco taxes to levels that amount to a policy of “prohibition by price,” and smuggling has risen to match — New York’s huge $4.35/pack cigarette tax is matched by the Center’s estimate that fully 60.9% of the cigarettes smoked there are smuggled in from other states.
  • When the IRS tries to crack down on tax evasion, their gains from increased revenue from enforcement can be offset by the loss of goodwill from innocent taxpayers who get caught in the net or who have to endure more paperwork or encounters with a suspicious bureaucracy. For a good example of how the IRS turned a loyal taxpayer into an enemy, read David Hanger’s letter It Is Not Ineptness of Incompetence, the IRS Is Stealing from You. The government relies on voluntary taxpayer compliance much more than on IRS enforcement and threats to fill its coffers, and so stories like this may represent a big threat.
  • The Early Retirement Extreme blog now has a wiki that will capture in a more encyclopedic fashion the wisdom of folks who are using voluntary simplicity principles to escape the rat race in style.

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

Miscellany:

  • The U.S. Department of Defense budget is notoriously sloppy. This is by design, as it allows for a lot of kickbacks and graft and such, and is the most popular place for politicians to put their pork projects. An independent audit recently conducted by “a Michigan State University economist [Mark Skidmore], working with graduate students and a former government official,” concentrating on the budgets for , found trillions of dollars of Pentagon spending that was never authorized by law. The Defense Department has announced that for the first time ever (!) the agency will conduct an audit of its finances.
  • According to a new study by Marius Frunza, the underground economy in the European Union succeeds in resisting €132 billion in Value-Added Tax each year, about 14% of the total amount of that tax the Union collects. Compare this to the “tax gap” in the U.S., which is estimated to be about 16%. This suggests to me that if the U.S. were ever to drop its income and payroll tax in favor of a VAT (as so-called “Fair Tax” promoters advocate), this might not have much effect on the over-all tax gap.
  • Reason magazine looks at a new biography of H.D. Thoreau.
  • The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement is still at its Archibald Tuttle-like ways: this time surreptitiously reestablishing a family’s utilities over the Christmas holidays after they had been cut off by the government utility monopoly for failure to pay tax-inflated charges.
  • Quaker Peace & Social Witness is a project of Britan Yearly Meeting. They have a new project called “Take Action on Militarism.” War tax resistance is nowhere mentioned as one of the actions you might consider taking, however, so chalk this up as another example of the decay of the practice of war tax resistance among Quakers since the end of the Cold War.
  • Some Spanish war tax resisters engaged in a collective redirection of their resisted taxes — donating that money to Stop Mare Mortum, which advocates for refugees.

New Tax Law Follies:

  • Kimberly Amadeo, at the balance, has written up a good summary of the various aspects of the new U.S. federal tax law. Some of it is still sketchy (she documents parts of the bill that were dropped before the bill was passed, for instance), so read it with caution, but it’s more thorough than most summaries I’ve seen.
  • Ruth Benn at NWTRCC looks at how the provisions of the new law may affect war tax resisters in particular.
  • Parts of the new law reduce the ability of people to deduct state taxes on their federal tax returns. This has the effect of raising federal taxes on people in higher-tax states — these are typically states like California and New York with high property values and affluent cities… also, not coincidentally, states that tend to vote Democrat. Those states are now considering ways to fight back by rejiggering their own tax systems in such a way that they can bring in as much revenue while preserving their citizens’ federal deductions. This may end up making the new tax law even more damaging to the fiscal health of the federal government than had been originally anticipated.

Yesterday I was on a panel concerning “Resisting Taxes in the Trump Era” at the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s spring gathering. Below is a summary of my remarks:

We can no longer reliably extrapolate from long-standing precedent about how the government operates, or how it responds to tax resisters, to anticipate the near future. While past tax policy changes have been slow, gradual, and predictable, near-future changes are likely to be abrupt, arbitrary, and unstable.

This presents us with new challenges but also new opportunities. I want to consider five areas the war tax resistance movement in the U.S. should be aware of, observant about, and prepared for. But it’s too early to draw strong conclusions about any of them:

  1. Changes at the IRS
  2. The possible end of the federal income tax
  3. Expanded government information-sharing
  4. Anti-Trumpery tax resistance
  5. How to resist tariffs

Changes at the IRS

First: the IRS is being significantly degraded and is in disarray. There have been four acting IRS commissioners already in the first four months of the Trump Administration, serving between four days and six-and-a-half weeks each. There is no Senate-confirmed commissioner. In addition there have been thousands of dismissals of probationary IRS employees, and many others have accepted buyout offers to retire early. Furthermore, the recently-released presidential budget assumes a further 25–50% headcount reduction at the agency. The enforcement & collection branches have not been spared from this slaughter.

The agency was already on-the-ropes before all this happened. For years they have lost headcount and their budget has dwindled, even as their responsibilities and the number of taxpayers has increased. There was briefly some hiring and a budget boost at the agency during Biden’s term, but that hardly had begun to take effect before Trump’s crew came in and eviscerated it.

As a result, we can predict that the already feeble agency will be further incapacitated.

Second: there has been a collapse of the post-Nixon consensus that put a firewall between IRS enforcement and political appointees. For the last 50 years it would have been considered a serious taboo for the president or one of his political appointees to try to go to the IRS and say “you should audit so-and-so; I think they’re up to something (or: I don’t like them).” IRS enforcement decisions were firmly in the hands of career IRS employees, not political appointees. Trump is putting an end to that. He’s put a political appointee in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. He’s being aggressive in using his powers to punish political enemies or to shake down deep-pocketed victims. We can expect that he will use the IRS in this way, too.

Will this affect American war tax resisters? Probably not right away. I don’t think we’re on Trump’s enemies radar, and we’re not attractive shakedown targets. But if tax resistance becomes a more prominent part of the anti-Trumpery movement, then, yes: expect politically-motivated reprisals.

The possible end of the federal income tax

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he plans to replace the IRS with an “External” Revenue Service, and replace income taxes with tariffs. Of course, Trump claims a lot of things, and that’s never been a good reason to take those claims seriously. But there are some other lines of evidence that suggest this may be for real.

Trump’s nominee for IRS Commissioner, Billy Long, when he was in Congress, co-sponsored legislation to abolish the IRS and replace the federal income tax with a sales tax. This idea of replacing income taxes with consumption taxes has been floating around conservative circles for decades, but hasn’t had enough traction to go anywhere yet. The “serious people” mostly ignore these proposals as being too onerous to accomplish and too likely to go very badly, but Trump shows strong signs of being willing to do very disruptive things and to not care much if they’ll go badly, so I think we have to consider the possibility.

This is not something Trump could do directly by fiat. Congress would have to act to eliminate the federal income tax or the Internal Revenue Service. But potentially Trump could force their hand by 1) unilaterally enacting tariffs, as he can do and has done, and 2) making the IRS so dysfunctional that it can no longer effectively collect income taxes, as he seems to be doing. At that point, Congress might be faced with a fait accompli and might believe that if it wants to continue to have a budget to spend, it must allow Trump to raise tariffs (or other consumption taxes) to make up for what the IRS is unable to collect.

This is probably not happening right away. The current Trump budget and tax proposals are for income tax cuts and for cuts to the IRS but not elimination of either.

Where would this leave war tax resisters, who tend to concentrate on the federal income tax as the most important source of war funding? We would have to retool to resist these new taxes in new ways. (More on this below.)

Expanded information-sharing among federal agencies

A variety of legal firewalls, bureaucratic hurdles, and incompatibilities have prevented federal government agencies from sharing information with each other. Some of that fell away during the consolidation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. Now many of the remaining firewalls seem to be dropping to DOGE.

Most news I’ve seen about this is in the immigrant-crackdown context. For example, the IRS is sharing info from people’s tax returns, and the postal service is sharing information about people’s mailing addresses, to help ICE find immigrants to deport.

Potentially this could make it easier for the IRS to find assets or previously shadowy income. There’s no sign that this is happening yet, and it would be yet another task for a gutted IRS to try to tackle, so maybe it’s unlikely, but it’s worth keeping on the radar, and we should raise the alarm if anyone notices anything.

Anti-Trumpery tax resistance and war tax resistance

There’s a lot of eagerness among anti-Trumpery activists for some strong, collective action, which could include tax resistance (see for example the National Tax Strike under the Choose Democracy umbrella).

Where does the war tax resistance movement fit in? Anti-Trumpery tax resistance isn’t “war” tax resistance. Sure, you can stretch “war” metaphorically to cover deportations, civil liberties collapse, evasion of due process, Constitutional crisis, willful malgovernance, fascism, white supremacy, and so forth, but it’s awkward. Most of NWTRCC’s outreach and educational material assumes that war and militarism are the focal concern of tax resisters, and to these new resisters this has the potential to be alienating at worst or confusing at best.

Of course, if Trump invades Greenland or Canada or something, then the anti-Trumpery movement will probably develop a strong anti-war focus, and then war tax resistance rhetoric will fit right in. I suppose we can’t rule that out.

It’s an encouraging sign that the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund mutual aid program now explicitly welcomes anti-Trumpery tax resisters as well as traditional war tax resisters. Maybe we can learn from the process they went through as they decided to become more accommodating to a new set of resisters.

Correction: the WTRPF board has since released a statement that says they are not going to extend the fund to cover tax resisters who are not resisting from anti-war motives. I had based what I said here on a statement from a member of the WTRPF board who apparently misstated the position of the organization.

How to resist tariffs

Trump would seemingly prefer that tariffs permanently make up a predominate portion of federal government income (and therefore military budget income), as they did in the 19th century. How could war tax resisters continue to resist if this were to come to pass?

Tariffs are taxes that apply to imported goods and that are paid by the U.S. importer. So you can resist to some extent simply by not importing anything so that you personally do not pay the tax. But the typical American is going to be paying tariffs indirectly as a consumer of goods whose prices include the costs of tariffs to the importer or manufacturer.

Note that tariffs apply not only to consumer-ready goods (like imported cars) but also to imported raw materials and intermediate manufacturing goods. For this reason, the prices of many “domestic” products will embed tariffs just as much as do imported ones. A tax resistance strategy of consuming only “Made in the U.S.A.” domestic goods will not be effective.

Some tactics that might be worth considering if tariffs make up a large amount of military income include:

  1. Anti-consumerism, lifestyle simplification, DIY, grow-your-own, repair/reuse/recycle: spend less money in general, take more of your life out of the marketplace, and you’ll spend less on tariffs.
  2. Smuggling: if tariffs are high, smuggling will become highly profitable and will certainly emerge. We can help nourish that and can redirect our own consumption to smuggled goods.
  3. Domestic manufacture: try to produce and market goods that deliberately and carefully avoid tariffs. Spread awareness about tariff-free goods.
  4. Promote avoidance strategies: there will certainly be loopholes that can be exploited to reduce or eliminate tariffs; we can help importers learn about and use them.
  5. Disrupt the tariff-collection bureaucracy: anything we can do to make the tax collectors’ work more difficult and less efficient will give the Pentagon less to play with.

These tactics (or similar ones) apply also to other consumption taxes that might be in the cards (e.g. a sales tax or use tax).