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Tax resistance in the United States has been practiced at least since colonial times, and has played important parts in American history.
The
theory that there should be "no taxation without representation," while
it did not originate in America, is often associated with the
American Revolution, in which that slogan did strong duty. It continues to be a rallying cry for tax rebellions today. American
Henry David Thoreau's theory of
civil disobedience
has proven to be extremely influential, and its influence today is not
limited to tax resistance stands and campaigns but to all manner of
refusal to obey unjust laws. These are among the theories of tax
resistance that have taken on a particularly American flavor and have
animated and inspired American tax resisters and tax resistance
campaigns.
No taxation without representation
In English political philosophy of the late 18th century, the theory
was prominent that in order for the sovereign to exact a tax on a
population, that population must be represented in a legislature that
had the sole power to levy the tax. That theory was made axiomatic in
the form of the slogan "no taxation without representation" (and similar
expressions).
The American colonies did not have representatives in the British
parliament, and so this axiom became a useful platform for colonial
rebels to justify their rebellion against direct taxes imposed by the
crown.
The standard-issue District of Columbia license plate bears the phrase, "Taxation Without Representation".
The "no taxation without representation" slogan was brought to bear in the arguments for tax resistance by African-Americans and by American women
who did not have the right to vote or serve in the legislature. It is
used today by the District of Columbia as part of a complaint that
residents of the district have no (voting) Congressional
representatives.
The phrase has such potent currency in American thought that it
is frequently used today in the context of tax debates that have little
to do with legislative representation, at least in the way that the
original coiners of the phrase would have understood: For example,
complaints that Congressional representatives only represent certain special interests, or that the complainer doesn't feel that his or her point of view is represented in legislative debates or actions.
Civil disobedience
Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay
On Resistance to Civil Government — now usually referred to as
Civil Disobedience — is part of the canon of American political philosophy.
It was prompted by Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax because of
unwillingness to support a government that was enforcing the slavery of
Americans and what he felt was an unjust war against Mexico.
Thoreau argued that obedience to government is often misplaced,
and that people should develop and trust their own consciences rather
than use the law as a crutch.
Thoreau's philosophy has inspired many tax resisters since,
especially those who have acted individually (not as part of a tax
strike or other large-scale movement) and from motives of conscientious
objection.
Conscientious objection to military taxation
The theory that taxpayers become complicit in the actions of their
government when they pay for the government's functioning and
requisitions through their taxes, and that therefore one must scrutinize
the actions of the government and refuse to pay for them if they become
grossly immoral, is key to the war tax resistance practiced by American
Quakers since colonial times.
It also forms an important philosophical basis for other religious and
secular American war tax resisters down to the present day.
War tax resisters in the United States pioneered the idea that
conscientious objection to military taxation
ought to be a legally protected right: that is, taxpayers who are
morally opposed to taking part in war should not be forced to fund war,
just as governments often permit such people to avoid military
conscription.
This theory has been extended by people who oppose other aspects
of government funding. A few have refused to pay taxes on the grounds
that some government health spending goes to institutions that provide
abortions. A number of Amish people refused to pay taxes for government social insurance programs on conscientious grounds.
Taxation as theft
A demonstrator at a "Tax Day" demonstration in Cincinnati, Ohio, holds a sign reading "taxation is theft"
The theory that taxation is ethically indistinguishable from robbery is a
staple of American anarchist and (often) libertarian thought. American
anarchist philosopher
Lysander Spooner put it this way:
Taxation
without consent is as plainly robbery, when enforced against one man,
as when enforced against millions… Taking a man's money without his
consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men,
acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is
done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and
calling himself a highwayman. Neither the numbers engaged in the act,
nor the different characters they assume as a cover for the act, alter
the nature of the act itself.
The original U.S.
Libertarian Party platform (1972) agreed that taxation was always a violation of the rights of the individual:
- Since we believe that every man is entitled to keep the fruits
of his labor, we are opposed to all government activity which consists
of the forcible collection of money or goods from citizens in violation
of their individual rights. Specifically, we support the eventual repeal
of all taxation. We support a system of voluntary fees for services
rendered as a method for financing government in a free society.
Tax protester theories
An enduring mythology of
tax protester arguments
asserts that the tax system operating in the United States is
unconstitutional, illegal, or doesn't actually apply to most of the
people currently being subjected to it.
These arguments, though they often take the form of "totally discredited legal positions and/or meritless factual positions,"
are often persuasive to people who have an unsophisticated
understanding of the legal system and who are susceptible to look
uncritically on arguments that appeal to their financial self-interest.
For example, in the early 1980s, an epidemic of tax protest swept
General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees
there told
GM to stop withholding
income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened
to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”
Practice
The
following sections briefly describe some of the more prominent examples
of tax resistance in colonial America and the United States:
Quaker conscientious objection to military taxation
The
Society of Friends
(Quakers) had a tradition of refusing to pay tithes to the
establishment church, and of refusing to pay explicit war taxes, from
the early years of the establishment of the sect.
When Quakers were permitted to establish an American colony,
Pennsylvania,
that they could run to some extent on their religious principles, the
Pennsylvania Assembly often offered some resistance to attempts by the
crown to exact money from the colony for the purposes of military
defense.
During the
French and Indian war,
the Pennsylvania colonial assembly conceded, and began raising a tax
from Pennsylvania residents for military fortifications. This led to
some, including influential Quakers
John Woolman and
Anthony Benezet, refusing to pay such taxes for reasons of conscientious objection.
This stand, and the eloquence the resisters employed to explain
it, proved influential, and a Quaker tradition of war tax resistance has
waxed and waned through American history to the present day.
Colonial resistance
A
typical American colonial government was headed by a governor, who was
appointed by the Crown and meant to represent the interests of the home
country, and a colonial assembly, elected by the colonists themselves.
The two not infrequently came into conflict over issues of taxation, and
when the governor assumed the right to tax colonists without the
consent of their legislature, this conflict might result in tax
resistance.
This happened for example in 1687 when New England governor
Edmund Andros
attempted to assess a new tax. Colonists declared their unwillingness
to pay such a tax, were imprisoned on orders of the governor, and this
ultimately led to the
1689 Boston revolt
in which Andros was overthrown. This muscle-flexing by American
colonists was an important precursor of the American Revolution, such
that
Ipswich, where a declaration defying the tax was signed, bills itself as "The Birthplace of American Independence 1687".
The
War of the Regulation
in colonial North Carolina was another important precursor of the
American Revolution. Colonists, fed up with what they viewed as a
corrupt and unrepresentative colonial government, stopped paying taxes
and ultimately rose in an armed revolt. In this case it was the entire
government — the governor, the assembly, and the corrupt bureaucracy —
that was the target of the rebellion.
Independence-minded colonials used a variety of tactics to
increase the economic independence and self-reliance of the colonies
while denying economic resources to the Crown. This included rampant
smuggling and attacks on British customs ships (as in the
Gaspee Affair), the refusal to allow British monopoly products to be brought to market (as in the
Boston Tea Party and
Philadelphia Tea Party),
boycotts of British-manufactured goods and the encouragement of local
production of replacement goods, and sanctions ranging from social
boycott to violent attacks aimed at tax collectors and collaborators.
The success of measures like these led John Adams to assert that the
American Revolution had already been accomplished before the
Revolutionary War began — that the war was less a revolution than a
failed counterrevolution.
Resistance in the post-revolutionary period
After
the success of the American Revolution, the independent United States
government of the former colonies was confronted by its own tax
resistance campaigns. Three were suppressed militarily by the fledgling
United States government:
Shays' Rebellion
Massachusetts farmers were motivated in part by increased taxes and heavy-handed tax enforcement when they rose up in
Shays' Rebellion.
They took action against government agencies that were enforcing tax
seizures, preventing their operation, until the suppression of the
rebellion.
The Whiskey Rebellion
Farmers far from coastal ports and population centers would often
ferment and distill their grain into whiskey locally because it was more
economic to bring whiskey to market than grain, from the point of view
of transportation costs.
Thus, when United States government put an excise tax on whiskey, this
was seen as an imposition by coastal elites at the expense of rural
farmers and was widely resented and resisted.
While resistance in the form of refusal to pay the excise tax or
to cooperate in the enforcement of excise laws persisted and largely
succeeded in some areas, in Western Pennsylvania this resistance erupted into attacks on tax collectors and eventual armed revolt — the
Whiskey Rebellion — which was violently suppressed by federal government troops under the command of former revolutionary war commander in chief
George Washington.
Fries's Rebellion
Fries's Rebellion began in opposition to a federal window-tax
instituted by the Adams administration, with resisters impeding the tax
assessors and refusing to pay the assessed taxes. This resistance
movement, too, was successfully suppressed by the federal government
when it rose to the level of armed rebellion.
Native / immigrant conflicts
The
United States government is largely run by and on behalf of the
European immigrant community, while United States territory also
encompasses the land of native people, some of whom live in separate
sovereign or semi-sovereign nations. Conflicts periodically erupt over
who could tax whom.
In the late-19th century, such conflicts led to tax resistance,
for example from thousands of people of part-native ancestry in Dakota
territory who forced the tax collector to retreat without his prize, from Crow in Montana who refused to pay for several years until the government there confiscated their livestock, or from non-native residents of Oklahoma Territory who wanted to be free from Cherokee Nation taxes.
Such conflicts continued into the 20th century. For example
Wallace "Mad Bear" Anderson led a tax resistance campaign of the
Tuscarora Nation
in 1959 in which they refused to pay state income tax, publicly
destroyed tax summonses, and engaged in sit-ins and other such protests. Members of the
Seneca Nation
blocked the Southern Tier Expressway in New York to protest the state's
attempt to extend a state sales tax to them in 1992. When members of
the
Iroquois Confederacy
blocked roads in a similar conflict in 1997, law enforcement responded
with brutal violence (the state would eventually pay out $2.7
million to victims).
African-Americans
Tax resistance has occasionally been deployed in the battle for civil rights for
black people in the United States. For example:
The "no taxation without representation" argument was evoked by African-American businessman
Paul Cuffee,
who refused to pay his state taxes and petitioned the legislature in
1780 and 1781 on behalf of himself and other African-Americans, saying
"we apprehend ourselves to be aggrieved, in that… we are not allowed the
privilege of freemen of the State, having no vote or influence in the
election of those that tax us."
Robert Purvis
refused to pay a school tax in Philadelphia in 1853, on the grounds
that his children were not allowed to attend the whites-only schools the
tax supported. "I object", he wrote, "to the payment of this tax, on
the ground that my rights as a citizen, and my feelings as a man and a
parent have been grossly outraged in depriving me, in violation of law
and justice, of the benefits of the school system which this tax was
designed to sustain."
Undermining Reconstruction state governments
After the
American Civil War, the United States government established
Reconstruction era governments in the states of the former
Confederacy that included
black and
carpetbagger representatives. The loss of political power by the formerly dominant
white supremacists
led to resentment, protest, and the formation of paramilitaries and
parallel governments. Occasionally, tax resistance was used as a tactic
to withdraw financial support and political legitimacy from the
reconstruction governments in favor of the white supremacist parallel
governments.
White supremacist gubernatorial candidate
John McEnery established a parallel government in Reconstruction Louisiana, in opposition to the carpetbagger government of governor
William Pitt Kellogg, and urged sympathetic citizens to pay taxes to his government rather than the Kellogg "usurpation."
Railroad bond shenanigans
In
the 1870s a number of American localities were victims of railroad bond
swindles. Promoters would ask the residents to vote to issue bonds to
pay for the running of a railroad line to their area, these bonds being
backed by the local tax base. In theory the economic growth that would
come from the new rail line would more than pay for the bonds by the
time they were mature and the bondholders needed to be paid off. In
fact, the railroad never materialized and the bond promoters vanished
with the money.
Some of these localities organized and refused to honor the bonds
they had issued. Because by the time the bonds had matured they had
likely been sold to new owners who did not participate in the original
fraud, the court system was not usually very sympathetic to the
defrauded taxpayers.
But this led to some notable examples of organized tax resistance in the United States.
For instance, in Cass and
St. Clair
counties, Missouri, local judges were elected who refused to enforce
higher court rulings in favor of the bondholders that would have forced
the County to inflict a tax in order to pay off the bonds. For a time,
the judges held court in a cave in order to evade their eventual
jailings for contempt of court.
In Steuben County, New York, the bondholders succeeded in forcing
the community to create a property tax to pay off the bonds, but
property owners refused to pay the tax and rallied to the support of
those whose property was seized for failure to pay, successfully
disrupting tax auctions.
In Kentucky, refusal to assess or pay taxes to pay off the bond
swindle persisted for decades. Some towns refused to elect sheriffs or
public officials of any kind (or no candidates could be found for the
positions) so that nobody was legally qualified to assess taxes or
engage in property seizures for failure to pay taxes. Local judges went
into hiding to evade the rulings of higher courts. Armed citizens
intimidated outsiders who tried to come and collect taxes by force.
Women's suffrage
Tax
resistance was a less important part of the women's suffrage struggle
in the United States than it was in the United Kingdom, but it still
played a role and had some notable practitioners.
- Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of those States, in
which woman has now by law a right to the property she inherits, to
refuse to pay taxes. She is unrepresented in the Government…
Lucy Stone
refused to pay her tax in 1858, on the grounds "that women suffer
taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to
one-half the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of
government."
Abby and
Julia Smith
were landowners in Glastonbury, Connecticut, who found in the 1870s
that their property tax assessments kept rising relative to those of the
male property owners of the area who could vote in local elections.
They responded by refusing to pay taxes on "no taxation without
representation" grounds, and their battle soon became a
cause célèbre among suffrage activists and sympathizers throughout the country (in part thanks to the sisters' knack for publicity).
Anna Howard Shaw's automobile was sold at tax auction in 1915 in a celebrated tax resistance case.
"Dr. Shaw has always believed in the contention of the Colonies that
'taxation without representation is tyranny' and has consistently
protested along this line when paying her taxes," she explained.
Tax resistance by newly-enfranchised women in Pennsylvania
As
women won the right to vote in the United States, they sometimes also
became vulnerable to taxes that had previously only applied to men. When
this happened in Pennsylvania, the shock was accompanied by resentment
that the school tax in question applied mostly to women living in rural
areas and not to those living in the largest Pennsylvania cities.
This example of American tax resistance is particularly
interesting because although it involved thousands of women in many
parts of the state and persisted for several years, there is little
evidence that the resistance was formally organized, and it wasn't
accompanied by much in the way of open protest — no rallies, picket
marches, petitions, manifestos, named organizations, political
coalitions, or things of that nature. It seems to have been a form of
leaderless resistance.
At first the women were emboldened by a quirk in the law that
forbade "the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any
female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind." It took the state legislature a couple of years to update that law after the women's tax resistance began, and several women were eventually jailed, briefly, for their resistance.
"Bond Slackers" during World War Ⅰ
Although the
U.S. government raised some of its war budget via taxes, the most visible public war funding measure during World War
Ⅰ was the
Liberty Bond program. Citizens were encouraged to loan money to the government for its war effort through the purchase of bonds.
Although the purchase of bonds was ostensibly voluntary, strong coercive pressure — up to and including mob violence — was directed at those who would not buy.
"Bond slackers" (the popular term at the time for people who did not
buy war bonds, or did not buy them in sufficient quantity) could be run
out of town, might lose their jobs, have their property stolen or vandalized, might be tarred-and-feathered, otherwise tortured, coated in paint, threatened with murder,
or subjected to hours of questioning by hooded interrogators in
impromptu star chambers in the hopes of prompting them to say something
that would incriminate them under the
Espionage Act.
Those who resisted such pressure and refused to buy war bonds
included conscientious objectors to war such as Jehovah's Witnesses and members of traditional
peace churches such as
Mennonites, anti-capitalist radicals, and European immigrants from countries the
U.S. and its allies were fighting.
Herbert Lord,
Director of Finance for the War Department, considered this "an
organized effort to discourage and defeat the loan," and it was
attributed to a conspiracy of "pro-German agents."
Property tax strikes during the Great Depression
The
Great Depression
introduced unprecedented tax burdens to Americans. While real-estate
values plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed, the cost of government
remained high. As a result, taxes as a percentage of the national income
nearly doubled from 11.6 percent in 1929 to 21.1 in 1932. Most of the
increase took place at the local level and especially squeezed the
resources of real estate taxpayers. Local tax delinquency rose steadily
to a record of 26.3% in 1933.
Many Americans reacted to these conditions by forming taxpayers'
leagues to call for lower taxes and cuts in government spending. By some
estimates, there were three thousand of these leagues by 1933.
Taxpayers' leagues endorsed such measures as laws to limit and rollback
taxes, lowered penalties on tax delinquents, and cuts in government
spending. Partly as a result of their efforts, sixteen states and
numerous localities adopted property tax limitations while three states
instituted homestead exemptions.
While taxpayers' leagues usually favored traditional legal and
political strategies, a few promoted tax resistance. Probably the best
known of these was the
Association of Real Estate Taxpayers (
ARET) in
Chicago. From 1930 to 1933, it led one of the largest tax strikes in American history.
ARET
functioned primarily as a cooperative legal service. Each member paid
annual dues of $15 to fund lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of
real-estate assessments. The suits, when finally filed, took the form
of a 7,000-page, two-foot-thick book listing the names and tax data for
all 26,000 co-litigants.
The radical side of the movement became apparent by early 1931 when
ARET
called for taxpayers to withhold real-estate taxes (or "strike")
pending a final ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court, and later the U.S.
Supreme Court. Mayor
Anton Cermak
and other politicians desperately tried to break the strike by
threatening criminal prosecution, revocation of city services, and the
seizure of property.
The Association's influence peaked in late 1932, with a
membership of near 30,000 people, a budget of over $600,000, and its own
radio show. A failed legal suit, government counter-measures, and
infighting took their toll and the movement, having in large part
accomplished its goals, declined thereafter.
The emergence of a non-sectarian war tax resistance movement
Tax resistance motivated by conscientious objection to war had
traditionally been practiced in the United States under the Christian
theory of
nonresistance as extrapolated by the historic
peace churches,
and its development had largely taken place within the context of those
churches. Rare exceptions included the brief flowering of tax
resistance among the New England
Transcendentalists like
Henry David Thoreau,
a small war tax resistance contingent in the late-19th Century pacifist
movement, and a few war tax resisters in small sects like the
International Bible Students and
Rogerenes.
After World War
Ⅱ, a non-sectarian
war tax resistance movement began to come together, and would develop
its own practices of war tax resistance under a more secular theory of
pacifism.
In 1948, the group
Peacemakers formed to (loosely) organize this movement. This group would develop a pacifist theory of
conscientious objection to military taxation
that was not tied to a particular religious doctrine. They published a
guide to war tax resistance in 1963 and developed tactics of resistance
practice and of publicity that would lead to the growth of the movement,
to a new resurgence of war tax resistance among the traditional peace
churches, and to the establishment of nonsectarian war tax resistance as
an ongoing part of the American scene.
Foes of social security taxation
The United States
Social Security
program had its share of critics and faced political opposition. It
also evoked some tax resistance against the payroll and self-employment
taxes that funded it. This came from two factions in particular:
conservatives who opposed the government program for ideological
reasons, and
Amish who had religious prohibitions against participating in insurance programs in general.
Conservative opposition
American conservatives who refused to pay payroll or self-employment
taxes for the social security program expressed their opposition in
terms of opposing government overreach into private lives and contracts,
and opposition to socialism. "For those of us who still have confidence
in our own ability," one wrote, "such a socialistic thing should not be
forced upon us."
About a dozen women from around Marshall, Texas organized in 1951
to refuse to submit Social Security taxes on behalf of their domestic
help. "It's not the money, it's the principle," said spokesperson
Carolyn M. Abney. "That law is unconstitutional."
It is a violation of the sanctity
of the American home. The law violates a basic American freedom. Already
business has been socialized and the American home is the last
stronghold against socialism. This may sound dramatic, but we are
fighting to preserve the freedoms our forefathers gave to us.
— Carolyn M. Abney, in "Texas Housewives to Press Social Security Test Case". Reading Eagle. 1952-07-01.
The "Texas Housewives" (as they were invariably called in the newspapers) lost a court case in 1952. They appealed on
13th Amendment
grounds; that's the amendment that bans involuntary servitude — their
attorney explained that the law "forces these housewives to be unpaid
tax collectors for the government." They lost this case as well, and in 1954 they failed in an attempted Supreme Court appeal. Meanwhile the government seized the resisted money from their bank accounts.
The women continued to defy the
Internal Revenue Service (
I.R.S.)
for some time after, claiming that the courts had not answered the
Constitutional question but had only verified the tax statute. They eventually gave up the fight and began to pay the required quarterly taxes for their employees.
Mary Cain
refused to pay $42.87 in self-employment tax in 1952 and hid her assets
to make sure the government would have to make it a criminal matter
(and thus a possible test case) rather than a simple civil asset
seizure. In the case that eventually resulted, Cain's arguments were turned down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and she had no luck with a Supreme Court appeal, but the government eventually dropped the case anyway.
When the government padlocked the office of her newspaper as part of a
seizure process, Cain sawed the lock off the door and mailed it to the
I.R.S. defiantly. "I’ve had enough of the New Deal. I’m sick of the whole Truman administration," she said.
Vivien Kellems,
who had previously tangled with the government by refusing to withhold
income taxes from her employees, refused to pay the self-employment tax
on her income in 1952, and recruited a small group of other
businesspersons (including Mary Cain) to join her protest. She wrote in a
letter to Treasury Secretary
John W. Snyder
that she felt she already had "adequate insurance" and she urged the
government to indict her so that she could be a test case to the Supreme
Court.
Conscientious objection from the Amish
The Amish have a strong tradition of
mutual aid and believe that purchasing insurance betrays distrust in God's providence
and in the community of believers. The original name of the Social
Security system was "Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance," and
Amish people interpreted it as a forbidden form of insurance.
Anyone who does not provide for
their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the
faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Because of this, when the U.S. government extended the Social
Security system to cover farmers in 1955, many Amish refused to
participate, and the government responded by seizing their property.
After some farmers had bank accounts seized, others closed their
accounts. When the government tried to levy checks due to the resisters
from the milk processing cooperatives they sold their milk to, the
cooperatives (also in Amish hands) refused to hand over the checks.
The government was then reduced to seizing livestock. In a
celebrated case in 1961, the government seized Valentine Byler's horses
during Spring plowing. Asked about this insensitivity to Byler's
livelihood, the district
I.R.S.
Chief of Collections answered, "Plowing never occurred to me. I live in
an apartment." Byler received messages of support from around the
country, and the press took up his cause.
What kind of "welfare" is it that
takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a
whole community into a "benefit" scheme it neither needs nor wants, and
which offends its deeply held religious scruples?
— "Welfarism Gone Mad". New York Herald Tribune. 1961-05-14.
The struggle would continue for a decade. Legislation that would
exempt the Amish from the Social Security program was introduced in
Congress at least as early as 1959,
and some of the resisters took the unusual step (unusual for the Amish)
of petitioning the government in 1961. In 1965, the United States
changed the Social Security law in a way that exempted self-employed
Amish people from having to pay into the Social Security program.
War tax resistance during the Vietnam War
In 1966,
A.J. Muste circulated a tax refusal pledge meant as an advertiement for the
Washington Post that 370 people signed, including the singer
Joan Baez, on the grounds "that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted."
This country has gone mad. But I
will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not
pay for the war in Vietnam.
— Joan Baez
In 1967,
President Lyndon Johnson proposed an income tax
surtax explicitly to pay for war expenses.
This was the first tax in the modern United States that was explicitly a
"war tax" and helped to boost the prominence of war tax resistance as a
protest tactic.
In early 1967, a "No Tax for War Committee" organized by
Maurice McCrackin circulated a sign-on statement that eventually attracted more than 200 signatures, and that read:
Because so much of the tax paid the federal government goes for
poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing
thousands upon thousands of people, as in Vietnam at the present time, I
am not going to pay taxes on 1966 income.
A "Writers & Editors War Tax Protest" the same year was somewhat
less bold in its declaration (not all declaring total resistance, but
some refusing to pay only the 10% surtax or only 23% of their total tax)
but more impressive in its list of names. The protest, which appeared
in
New York Post,
New York Times Book Review and
Ramparts was eventually signed by about 528 people including
Nelson Algren,
James Baldwin,
Robert Bly,
Noam Chomsky,
Robert Creeley,
David Dellinger,
Philip K. Dick,
Robert Duncan,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Leslie Fiedler,
Betty Friedan,
Allen Ginsberg,
Todd Gitlin,
Paul Goodman,
Edward S. Herman,
Paul Krassner,
Staughton Lynd,
Dwight Macdonald,
Jackson Mac Low,
Norman Mailer,
Peter Matthiessen,
Milton Mayer,
Ed McClanahan,
Henry Miller,
Carl Oglesby,
Tillie Olsen,
Grace Paley,
Thomas Pynchon,
Adrienne Rich,
Kirkpatrick Sale,
Ed Sanders,
Robert Scheer,
Peter Dale Scott,
Susan Sontag,
Terry Southern,
Benjamin Spock,
Gloria Steinem,
William Styron,
Norman Thomas,
Hunter S. Thompson,
Lew Welch,
John Wieners,
Kurt Vonnegut and
Howard Zinn. The ad included a quotation from Thoreau's
Civil Disobedience that ends:
If a thousand men would not 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.
— Henry D. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
(The
Washington Post refused to print the ad "on the grounds that it was an implicit exhortation to violate the law", and the
New York Times too, on the grounds that "we do not accept advertising urging readers to perform an illegal action" but thanks to the
Streisand effect the word got out even better that way.)
In 1972,
Jane Hart, wife of
U.S. Senator
Philip Hart, said that she would be resisting the federal income tax. By this time, every major
I.R.S. center had a staff member assigned to be the "Viet Nam Protest Coordinator."
American tax resistance in the 21st Century
Tax
resistance continues continues to be a background theme in American
political discussion, and occasionally tax resistance campaigns break
out in the United States.
The "Don't Buy Bush's War" campaign in 2007–08, organized by
Code Pink to protest the
U.S. War against Iraq, got 2,000 people to sign a tax resistance pledge.
The
Tea Party protests
of 2009 were in part a protest against high taxes (in addition to the
allusion to the Boston Tea Party, the name was supposed to stand for "
Taxed
Enough
Already"). Code Pink even reached out across the ideological aisle to try to find some common ground.
Tax resistance is used in smaller-scale struggles as well. When
23 county officials in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania were charged with
corruption, and the county nonetheless decided to raise taxes by 10%,
residents rebelled. One, Fred Heller, recorded a song in 2010 — "Take
This Tax and Shove It" — to try to rally people to refuse to pay. When a smoking ban in Lansing, Michigan cut into their business, several taverns there launched a tax strike in 2011.
When the Seattle, Washington, City Council introduced a city income tax
in 2017, the state Republican Party did not wait for the tax to be
ruled unconstitutional, but immediately called for "nothing less than
civil disobedience — that is, refusal to comply, file, or pay."
Take this tax and shove it
We ain’t paying you crooks no more
The good ol’ boys stole all our cash
And ran out the courthouse door
— Fred Heller, "Take This Tax and Shove It"
