Taxation Without Representation

I am exercising my First Amendment rights. I never use AI in my writing.

It’s tax day again. I’m not against taxes. I view taxes as necessary to live collectively in a society. How else could we have roads, sewers, national parks, public libraries, science, a social safety net?

But under this stupid, cruel, and corrupt regime, my federal taxes support fascism, racism, domestic terrorism, idiotic wars, war crimes, civil rights abuses, and wealth transfers to the Epstein class: in short, everything I stand against. I hate that my money is going into the bank accounts of ICE goons. I hate that I’m funding this idiotic war with Iran, a pedophile’s way to throw a tantrum and manipulate markets.

The “social contract” - what we get back from society relative to what we pay for participating (in money, time, broken dreams etc.) - has gotten steadily worse for me, and probably for you, too, over our lifetimes, as class disparity has grown. Under the Trump regime, the social contract has ruptured for me. People in oppressed groups may feel like they have never had an acceptable social contract in America.

Even under a good government, there will always be uses of my taxes that I disagree with. This is also part of the social contract - we live together, collectively, and we don’t always agree on everything. That’s fine. And a president’s most important role is to unify the country, to remind us that we don’t always agree but that, nonetheless, the government serves every American. Instead, Trump sows as much division and hatred as he can, and seeks revenge against Americans, like me, who don’t support him. In other words, this government does not represent me; it instead would prefer to destroy me. By paying my taxes, I’m funding an apparatus that wishes to destroy me.

Spoiler alert: I did pay my taxes (thousands owed, due to a mistake my wife made on a W-4). I hated doing it, and I hated myself a little for doing it. But that got me to thinking about social contracts more generally.

Remember the time last week when Trump threatened to nuke Iran? It occured to me that if he had gone ahead and nuked Iran, I defnitely wouldn’t have sent in my owed taxes. There’s an incredibly strong, social contract that our government won’t nuke Iran of an evening for no discernible reason whatsoever. We don’t talk about it much, because normally (“norms”), it’s not likely to happen. The social contract also compels most of us to go into work in the morning like good little cogs in the machine of capitalism. For years, even under Democratic presidents, our country’s remarkable lobbyist-induced inaction on climate has made it much harder for me to go to work as though everything is “normal” (that word again). This is because having a habitable planet feels like it should be part of our social contract, along with a living wage: we work our jobs, get paid, pay our taxes, and our government listens to science and acts in a reasonable way. Why is this so hard? (Answer: the billionaire class.)

Maybe you don’t need a list of some ways in which this regime has been stealing from us to enrich themselves, consolidate power, and make the world worse, but I needed to write it just to help feel a little less like I’m going crazy. How can Trump steal so much so openly without, so far, any consequences? The flagrant lack of consequences is another breach of our social contract.

• Billions, maybe a trillion, for an idiotic war with Iran. Billions for genocide in Palestine. Your tax dollars at work!

• Extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean and violent regime change in Venezuela to steal oil money and squander the relatively stable world order that existed since World War II.

• Trump sent at least $20 billion of our money to bail out his far-right friend in Argentina, Javier Milei.

• Trump accepted an old Boeing 747 from Qatar as a bribe, which required $1 billion of our taxes to refurbish.

• The regime has obligated $85 billion of our money to fund the ICE Gestapo, its domestic terror campaigns, and its concentration camps.

One of the regime’s concentration camps, in Montana.

• The regime announced that they would vindictively halt Medicare funding to the state of Minnesota, ostensibly “to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money.” As an aside, we note here that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” from last July created a sudden, unnecessary, and fundamental insolvency in Medicare.)

• Trump has unconstitutionally paid himself $10 billion of our tax money for his bullshit “Board of Peace.”

• Trump is helping himself to $230 million of our tax money as “compensation” for prior Justice Department investigations. (From the linked NYT article: “What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”)

• Trump’s golfing cost taxpayers over $150 million in his first term, and he’s on track to spend twice that in his second term. Much of this golfing is on his own properties, so much of the money goes to “The Trump Organization.”

• Kristi Noem’s luxury jet.

• More instances of flagrant market manipulation and insider trading corruption than I can keep track of, like this one (worth a watch, trust me).

Honorable mention for corruption in the form of pay-to-play stuff, which is how the billionaire class steals the government and therefore how our taxes are used. For example, the White House ballroom costs $300 million, with the money coming in the form of bribes from his billionaire buddies. (This is couch change for them, but it leads to things like lucrative Iran war contracts.) Another example: Trump effectively sold a pardon to a crypto criminal, Changpeng Zhao, in exchange for billions in investments in the Trump family’s very own crypto coin, “World Liberty Financial.” For another example, see the United Arab Emirate’s $2 billion bribe, also in purchases of Trump’s crypto coin, in exchange for AI chips.

It makes me sick that my tax dollars are being used to break the world. By paying our federal taxes, we’re supporting the Trump regime’s murderous crimes and sending money to the Epstein class, and these assholes are furthermore destroying programs we care about, like science, education, USAID, the social safety net, and transitioning away from fossil fuels to have a livable planet. That feels awful. I’m also tired of paying for Trump to enrich himself through golfing.

Could tax resistance be a useful response?

Tax resistance is a principled withholding of federal taxes. It can be done legally by reducing income to below the standard deduction ($15,750 per individual for 2025). It can be done illegally by simply not paying. Tax resistance can be an act of civil disobedience.

Sharon and I file our taxes jointly. We tried war tax resistance a decade ago, to protest funding US warfare. We soon began receiving letters from the IRS threatening to charge penalties and garnish our wages, Sharon withdrew her consent, and ultimately we paid our taxes.

We talked about trying tax resistance again this year, but decided not to. Which is, frankly, disturbing. The world is breaking down around us, and at some level I’m still going along with it like a frog in hot water. What does it take to leave this broken social contract, and how does one go about doing that? I’ve been trying to explore these questions for a long time. There are no easy answers.

The main thing that made me decide to just pay was a sense that there wasn’t an organized collective movement for tax resistance. Sometimes civil disobedience does feel worth the risk to me: I’ve chosen to risk arrest for climate civil disobedience, when the risk seemed worth the opportunity to communicate a critical message to the public. Tax resistance is a civil disobedience tool suited not so much for communication and movement building, but instead for direct material challenge to systems of power, similar to a general strike. This is, of course, crucial - the communicative civil disobedience is for movement building in service of this goal - but it requires mass organization to be effective. One person striking alone gets quietly fired; many people striking together change systems. For tax resistance in 2025, I didn’t see enough organization - yet - to make it feel worth the risk. To those who did choose tax resistance, I salute you. How could we organize something bigger going forward?

The resistance is still too disorganized. I’m grateful to the No Kings march organizers, because the marches are necessary, even if they’re not sufficient. Folks are also planning a general strike for May 1; I hope it gains a lot of momentum between now and then.

But what might be tremendously helpful right now is a top-down interstate blue coalition. What will it take for the Democrats to finally oust the billionairist bootlicking Schumers and find some real leadership?

There are more anti-fascists than there are fascists. Where are the opposition leaders?

With love and rage,

Peter