And Why Would They Do That, When DOGE Has Shown How They’ve Been Wasted?

 

These are all good reasons to withhold your taxes. Can the tactic work? Is it right? Morally and politically motivated tax nonpayment has an honorable, if not always successful, history. After the Roman empire’s destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD Jewish people refused to pay Rome’s “temple tax”. Rome responded by destroying more temples. Gandhi’s salt tax protest, on the other hand, was the first step toward India’s independence from the British empire. The American Revolution was a tax revolt, and that worked – although some colonists resisted taxes levied by the revolutionaries and, after independence, the states as well.

Well, indeed! It's almost as if, when you show people how to keep their own money, they want to continue to do so, isn't it? 

One of the diabolical features of what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an “anti-state state” like our current regime is its ability to turn acts of resistance against the state against themselves. Principled prosecutors and agency heads resign rather than carry out the president’s illegal orders – leaving only Maga flunkies in their places. Civil servants quit rather than pervert the services or science they’ve devoted their careers to – leaving the work unguarded and the workforce decimated, precisely as the wrecking crew intends.

This is the modern interpretation of 'decimated', despite the actual effects being closer to the original 10% reduction. 

Thanks to intentional staff shortages at the IRS, your missing tax payment might go unnoticed, just as the Trump family’s multibillion-dollar fraud escaped the agency’s auditors for decades. But if tax evasion is a secretive act, tax resistance is civil disobedience, a public, political act. The reason to withhold your taxes is not to cheat the government of much-needed funds. It is not even to cheat the crooks now running the country, satisfying as that may be. It is to expose the criminality of what is being done – and not done – with the money the state has a legal and moral obligation to collect and then to distribute, to serve all the people.

Can anyone imagine what this idiot would have said had Republican voters decided to withold their taxes rather than see them spent on Biden's pet prtojects? Sher'd have demanded they be sent to Guanatanamo!