There’s a new IRS Data Book out, so I can update these numbers on enforcement activity:

When tariffs rise, tariff evasion becomes a useful way to boost profits or to undercut competitors. Firms that can figure out how to evade tariffs or to find suppliers who evade their tariffs are at a great advantage. And so it’s no surprise that, right on schedule, tariff evasion techniques are thriving under the tariff-happy Trumperist regime.

This also has the salutary effect of encouraging the survival and growth of those firms who are most willing to encourage and to engage in federal tax evasion, at the expense of tax-compliant firms.

A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that experiment suggests that we may have been interpreting it incorrectly. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the experiment, showing how it is typically portrayed:

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram… intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiments unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts.

That “unexpectedly” part is probably not true. I think the researchers suspected, in the wake of e.g. the Holocaust, that people were generally willing to obey awful instructions in ways that they failed to account for. Their experiment was designed to answer not whether but how much.

But it turns out the “conflicting with their personal conscience” part may also have been unwarranted. The results of the experiment have usually been interpreted as a kind of cynicism or caution about human nature, and about people’s tendencies to let their consciences be silenced by the trappings of authority. But such takes may have been too optimistic.

Milgram interviewed his subjects after the experiment and found that those who stopped giving shocks felt that they were responsible for what they were doing, while those who continued giving shocks felt that the experimenter (the one giving the instructions to the subject) was responsible. Milgram theorized that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role: the “agentic state.” Once you are in that state, you stop considering yourself responsible for what you are doing and for the effects of what you are doing, and judge your actions only on whether you are doing it according to how the authority wants it done.

Arne Johan Vetlesen, in Evil and Human Agency (2005), pointed out that there is another possible interpretation: Milgram’s subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses. In subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being allowed by their situation to do things they were ordinarily inhibited from doing.

He quoted Ernest Becker, who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:

…[M]an brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures. He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper. He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt. He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression. He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: “You die, not me.” The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings.

Which reminded me of what H.L. Mencken (who ought to be given the respect de Tocqueville gets) wrote about the supposedly hypnotic influence of the mob:

The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.

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In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members — in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious — perhaps 95 per cent. All studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness. They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels. This is nonsense. The lower orders of men are incurable rascals, either individually or collectively. Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage — these virtues belong only to a small minority of men. This minority never runs amuck. Its most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all running amuck. The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions. A whoop strips off his disguise.

Hannah Arendt, whose examination of the Adolf Eichmann trial was going on at around the same time as the early Milgram experiments, warned that the excuse of “obedience” (as used by the compliant Milgram subjects to explain their actions after-the-fact, and secondarily by Milgram himself in his theory) was not an explanation but a “fallacy”:

Only a child obeys. An adult actually supports the laws or the authority that claims obedience.

Now David Kaposi and David Sumeghy have gone back through the audio tapes and other documentation preserved from the original Milgram experiments. They found that the “obedient” subjects were not in fact very compliant at all. Indeed none of them actually followed the experimental procedures they had been instructed to comply with.

Only a few of the subjects complied with the experimental procedures they were given in full, and all of them were among those who eventually refused to continue with the experiment.

(1) no entirely “fully obedient” participant fully obeyed the procedures Milgram’s experimenter instructed them to do; (2) violations of the procedures occurred on average 48.4% of the time in “fully obedient” sessions; and (3) violations occurred significantly more frequently in “fully obedient” than in the obedient phase of “disobedient” sessions.

Tellingly, these procedural violations were not efforts to avoid giving shocks, but actually increased the likelihood that an opportunity to give another shock would arise:

The most frequent violation in obedient sessions involved reading the memory test questions over the simulated screams of the learner. Doing this effectively guaranteed that the learner would fail the test and receive another shock. By talking over the protests, the obedient subjects abandoned the [ostensible] goal of testing memory and simply facilitated continuous shocks.

The implication is that when Milgram interviewed the “obedient” subjects after the experiment was over, these subjects represented themselves as having merely obeyed because this was an excuse for their behavior that had been dangled before them temptingly during the experiment, and they anticipated that this excuse would be accepted. Milgram, by being willing to accept this excuse at face-value, in effect validated it and cooperated with the subjects in whitewashing their surrender to sadistic temptation.

As I mentioned last month, I file paper tax returns with the IRS for reasons.

Way back in the day, when everyone filed paper returns, you could go down to the library or post office and grab the forms you needed from stacks set out there for the purpose. As the IRS encouraged people to transition to electronic filing, these sources of paper forms evaporated, and you instead were expected to order the forms you needed from the IRS website, whereupon the agency would deliver them to you by mail.

At first, I might order these forms early in the year and see them arrive in early February, around the same time that W2s and 1099s and the like start showing up in the mail. But each year, the date that the forms have arrived has gotten later and later. This year I ended up filing for a filing extension–the first time I have had to do so–as the forms I needed had not yet arrived (the last one just turned up yesterday, four days before the filing deadline). The forms have been showing up in dribs and drabs for weeks now.

I mention this mostly just as another data point about the reduced capabilities of the hobbled agency.

This page summarizes my twenty-third year of tax resistance. (Links to previously posted Picket Line pages expand on some things I mention. You can follow these links by clicking on the “♦” symbols.)

Picket Line Annual Report

Twenty-three years ago, on 19 March 2003, the U.S. attacked Iraq. This began a foolish, brutal, aggressive war, launched on dishonest pretenses, with disastrous results. For me it was the last straw, and I started what I then called “an experiment” in tax resistance so that I might no longer feel as complicit.♦ My goal was to stop financially supporting the U.S. government. That government has continued to get worse, and so my attitude continues to be one of not wanting its misbehavior on my conscience.

Tax Resistance

At first I had hoped to stop financially supporting the government entirely legally, by lowering my income below the federal income tax line. I quit my job to start a one-man consulting business in which I could regulate my income, and I took advantage of legal tax deductions and credits, while also attending to frugality. This turned out to be a successful way to legally avoid federal income tax, as well as a rewarding way to make a living, and I continue to operate this way today.

However, I have been liable for self-employment tax in most years (this is different from the income tax but also goes to the federal government). In 2006 I decided to stop paying that tax as well. I have not found a useful way to do this legally, so I simply neglect to send a check along with my tax return. As a result I have accumulated an unpaid tax bill which, along with penalties & interest added by the IRS (minus a bit that they’ve managed to seize from me over the years, and some that is now uncollectible due to the statute of limitations), now adds up to something in the neighborhood of $94,000.

My two-track strategy of legally avoiding income tax while extra-legally refraining from paying self-employment tax is somewhat awkward to explain, but works for me.

Many years ago, the IRS levied my bank accounts and seized about $6,200 of the total of about $154,000 that I have so far refused to pay. I don’t have any fail-safe plan to hide assets, so the IRS could continue to seize money when they find it. However they haven’t taken anything from me for almost twenty years, and they don’t even seem to have tried very hard, though they still send me pleading letters from time to time. This lack of enforcement may mean they’ve run out of easy seizure targets, or it may mean my overdue amount falls under the threshold at which they start trying harder. (Years of budget cuts and other crises made the agency something of a paper tiger, and then the already weakened agency fell victim to the haphazard decisions of DOGE and the trumperists.)

In 2018, the IRS filed a formal tax lien against me in my local court system. They updated that lien in each of the following two years, stopped for a while, and have since occasionally reestablished the lien. The lien has not had any practical effect on my life or my tax resistance. The only effect I have noticed so far is junkmail from shady companies promising they can settle my tax debt for pennies on the dollar (the lien is a public document, so these companies use lien filings to target their sales pitches).♦ The lien didn’t even register on my credit report, which I found surprising.

The total amount I owe is well over the threshold at which the IRS is supposed to notify the State Department that I ought to be forbidden a passport and perhaps ought to have my passport revoked. It took the agency longer than I expected, but they eventually submitted such a notification in 2019.♦ This means that the State Department could revoke my passport at any time, and in any case is not supposed to allow me to renew it when it expires in 2028. So far they have not revoked my passport.

Last May, when another year of my tax debt became uncollectible due to the statute of limitations, I wrote a check for that amount to the International Refugee Assistance Project, as a charitable donation to celebrate. I hope to make a similar donation to some charity in a couple of months when another year’s taxes seem likely to become uncollectible in the same way.

My 2025 Federal Tax Resistance

After all the dust settled, last year I “owed” and refused to pay $4,501 in federal taxes.

(I have not filed my taxes yet, so this may change once I actually sit down with the forms. I file paper returns for reasons. This has turned out also to be a way to measure the health of the Internal Revenue Service. When I began filing returns many years ago, it was typical for the government to have its tax forms ready for taxpayers to use no later than the beginning of February or so, by which time people were also receiving their W-2s and 1099s. If you were a keep-your-inbox-empty sort, you could file your taxes on February 1^st, check it off the list, and smile condescendingly at people who were still scrambling in April. But over the past several years, the government has become less and less capable of having its forms ready by tax filing season. I’m still awaiting the delivery of several forms that apparently are not printed up yet, or are still stuck in their mailing queue. While I’m pretty confident attributing this to agency ineptitude, it’s also possibly a passive-aggressive way of discouraging people from filing paper returns.)

Sustainability

I want to continue to resist taxes for the long term, so it is important (if I want to stick to my below-the-tax-line method) that my expenses remain low enough that my income-tax-free income is sustainable. In 2025 I brought in almost $32,000 in profit from my business. My day-to-day expenses rose, thanks to inflation and such. Rents in my part of California are high, and rent amounts to nearly 60% of my annual taxable expenses. As best as I can estimate, my regular costs for things like rent, utilities, food, and transportation that I must pay for out of below-the-tax-line income came to about $2,133 per month, or $25,600 a year:

Not included in the above pie chart are any business expenses that I can deduct from my taxable income, most healthcare expenses (which I could pay for from my pre-tax Health Savings Account), my self-employment tax assessment (half of which I can deduct), or money I put aside for retirement (which I typically do in tax-deferred accounts).

I now rent an apartment at which many of the utilities are bundled into the rent. This makes it difficult to compare expenses over time, as in some past years utilities were a more significant distinct line-item.

My transportation budget is very low because where I live it’s easy to get around on bike and so I don’t own a motor vehicle and rarely need to use one. I’ve also been learning to do my own bike repairs and maintenance at the local “bike kitchen,” which keeps my costs even lower.

My health expenses were low last year, so I didn’t have to dip into my Health Savings Account. It’s replenished enough to more than cover my deductible in case I run into bad health luck. I use it more as an additional retirement savings vehicle than for health expenses these days.

My yearly living expenses take up pretty much all of my “under the tax line” budget, but I’ve got enough squirreled away in savings now that I don’t feel like I’m cutting things too close for comfort.

However, if I were to budget-in the imposed self-employment tax (which I don’t intend to voluntarily pay, but which could be seized from me), that would come to another $4,500 or so of expenses, half of which also counts against my under-the-tax-line budget. And even if the government never gets its hands on that money, I’ve adopted the practice of making charitable donations to match the amount of my back taxes that become uncollectible due to the statute of limitations. For example, if my oldest tax debt is voided by the statute of limitations next month, I hope to write a check for $5,007 to some charity to celebrate. I can’t do that within my budget: I have to dip into savings, and I may ultimately have to tap my retirement accounts if I want to keep that up year after year. But I don’t expect this will be any great sacrifice or that it will cause any insurmountable personal hardship; I think I have a sufficient buffer for this.

My 1040: A walk-through

Here’s how I expect my 1040 will work out this year. First, my Total Income:

My business income is from my consulting work as a technical writer and from sales of my books. That income was lower than anticipated this year (my billable hours can vary wildly from month to month, which makes annual income targets hard to hit). This left me a lot of extra room in my zero-tax-bracket, so I took advantage of this by selling a small cache of gold and silver coins I’d bought years ago. Apparently you can’t get the 0% low-taxable-income long-term capital gains rate on precious metals like this. The best you can do is your marginal income tax rate. But for me this year that rate is zero, so with that and the recent spikes in gold and silver prices, it was a good time to sell. After selling all I had, I still had $4,000+ room in my 0% bracket, so I converted some of my traditional IRA to my Roth IRA so I could keep that money income-tax-free from here out.

Now on to my Adjusted Gross Income:

Last year, I put away $13,900 for retirement and another $5,300 for either current medical spending or for retirement. Together, those savings represent more than 42% of my income.

The self-employment tax deduction works like this: When you work for someone else, that employer pays half of your FICA and the other half comes out of your paycheck. This means the half paid by your employer doesn’t count as your income and so you don’t pay income tax on it. If you’re self-employed, you are supposed to pay both halves of the tax, so the IRS lets you take half (roughly) of your self-employment tax as an income tax deduction to even things out (even if you’re refusing to pay, like I am♦).

My Adjusted Gross Income is below the $23,750 threshold at which I get the maximum rate on the Retirement Savings Contributions Credit. That is the target I try to hit in order to get my federal income tax down to zero.

Now we go from Adjusted Gross Income to Taxable Income:

The Qualified Business Income deduction is 20% of that portion of my income that comes from self-employment, capped at 20% of what my taxable income would be without the deduction, but minus my capital gains. The first Trump administration cut corporate income taxes, and this deduction was designed to give a similar break to non-corporate business entities (like me) who declare business earnings on our personal income tax forms. In most years since this deduction was enacted I have qualified for it, but this year my capital gains disqualified me. It has never actually made a difference to the bottom line of how much I owe, though.

Anyway, from there, my tax owed:

I plan to file a tax return that shows these accurate amounts, but I will not include a check for the tax due.

Other Goals

I hope other people will resist their taxes too, and I have tried to make The Picket Line a good resource for people who are resisting or considering it. But I’ve been much less active on this front lately. A while back I stepped back from the blog and stopped creating new content for it. I’d gotten tired of being a tax resistance scholar and activist, and felt like decentering tax resistance in my life, to make it more incidental, and to occupy myself more with other pastimes.

I did however create a free, on-line version of Tax Strike Tactics — an updated version of my book 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns. And I spoke on a NWTRCC panel about “Resisting Taxes in the Trump Era.”♦ It continues to baffle me how few ostensible political activists, principled “opposition” partisans, allegedly god-fearing Christians, and so forth, are willing to consider stopping their support of trumpery and its bipartisan and bureaucratic enablers. (There are some!) In general, the American people seem doomed to support the government no matter how reductio ad absurdum that gets. But now I’ve just baked that in to my worldview and am trying to Stoically observe it and let it go without getting worked up about it.

Much of my “activism” of late is less focused on politics and protest and rebellion, particularly on the national/global scale, and much more focused on embarrassingly wholesome direct action at the local scale. I’ve been volunteering regularly for the local food bank at one of our farmers’ markets, bringing thousands of pounds of fresh donated produce to a food pantry to give to hungry families. And I’ve been working as operations manager for a mobile shower trailer program that serves homeless people in our community several times a week. As a side project there, last year I created VivaSLO!, a free on-line guide to avoiding, surviving, and escaping homelessness in San Luis Obispo county. (All of this volunteer work is easier for me because of the reduced and more-flexible work hours that are part of my tax resistance, and so can be seen as another form of tax redirection.♦)

I’ve also been continuing my work on a sequence of essays examining the virtues and how to improve in their practice. It has been an unexpected delight this year to discover that virtue-oriented guidance has become one of the best tools yet discovered for guiding the development of the AI characters who are becoming so important in our lives. This makes my virtue-scholarship, which at times could feel like nostalgic throwbacks to unfashionable ways of thinking about ethics, feel prescient and very now after all.

Prospects for the coming year

We are in an era of (among other things) considerable uncertainty regarding the future (or even the present) of the tax code. But assuming tax law (or its equivalent in trumpery) remains more or less the same, and assuming no major unexpected expenses or windfalls, I’m well-positioned to live comfortably and well under the income tax line again in the coming year, though I will again likely “owe” (and refuse to pay) self-employment tax.

I’ve prepared for the possibility that the IRS may try to seize money from me for unpaid back taxes, so in case this happens, it won’t be a disaster. And, if they fail again, I’m also prepared to dip into my savings to give to charity in celebration.

So on to year twenty-four of my “experiment.”