Sorry Geese: If you don’t pay your taxes, Uncle Sam may have you plucked

If you’ve been thinking about tax resistance lately, you’re not alone.

On progressive social channels, I’ve seen increasing calls for a federal tax strike in response to a federal government that doesn’t even pretend to represent all Americans, that uses base language to demonize immigrants and left-leaning citizens, and openly penalizes cities and states the president and his minions consider hostile to their agenda.

There’s also the hip Brooklyn indie band Geese, whose new album, Getting Killed, has a song called “Taxes.”

If you want me to pay my taxesIf you want me to pay my taxesYou better come over with a crucifixYou’re gonna have to nail me down

Here’s a clip of them performing it in late September. That last line really gets the crowd pumped.

Gen Zers can clearly relate to Geese’s sentiment—whatever it means. And so can I. In my twenties, I was incensed to discover I had to pay taxes to the Reagan government for stuff I vehemently disagreed with—like wildly excessive military budgets and a nuclear stockpile vastly larger than any country would need to deter the Soviets (or anyone else) from starting something—fingers crossed.

But a goose that refuses to pay taxes may end up in the hoosegow. You can launch a tax strike, sure, but Uncle Sam is likely to show up with that crucifix, according to the experts I spoke with.

It’s not a crime to misreport something on a complicated return where there may be gray areas, says a criminal tax defense attorney who asked not to be named for fear his clients could be targeted by the Trump administration. “You may get audited and you may owe tax, but that’s not a willful event.”

But if you simply decide, for political or other reasons, that you’re not going to file and pay, well, that is a willful event—the “intentional violation of a known legal duty”—and a misdemeanor punishable by up to $25,000 (plus the government’s legal expenses) and a year in the slammer.

The United States has a long history of tax resistance, starting with the pre-revolutionary Boston Tea Party, a revolt by colonists against the tyranny of King George III and Britain’s levying of taxes without representation.

One of the more notable tax-resistance movements arose in the Depression era, which spawned thousands of local and state taxpayer groups. It was a time of intense public hardship, no formal safety net, and widespread local corruption, during which citizens and businesspeople began organizing to demand their tax dollars be better used to serve the public interest.

“They weren’t against taxes. They were against tax abuse. There was a lot of corruption, there was a lot of nepotism,” says historian Linda Upham-Bornstein, a senior lecturer at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University and author of the recent book Mr. Taxpayer Versus Mr. Tax Spender: Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law During the Great Depression.

Most of the battles were over property taxes, she explains, and groups typically employed tactics such as conducting public education campaigns, filing lawsuits, and backing their own candidates for office. But when all else failed, groups sometimes threatened tax strikes. Perhaps the largest, lasting from 1931 to 1933, was a property tax rebellion led by the local Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in Chicago. It almost bankrupted the city, Upham-Bornstein says, but in the end, the US Supreme Court ruled against the group, and the effort collapsed.

There are various instances, mostly at the city and county level, where “fear of a strike would get people to the table,” Upham-Bornstein says. But for an actual tax strike to succeed is “very rare,” and virtually nonexistent on the federal level: “It would never work,” she says. The federal government needn’t fear bankruptcy.

The Vietnam War brought about a surge of political tax resistance, as some taxpayers chafed at the thought of their money bankrolling US atrocities. But tax law bears no exception for moral qualms. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the US government seized property and livestock of Amish farmers who refused to pay a Social Security tax for religious reasons. (The farmers finally prevailed in 1965, when Congress granted them a exception; the antiwar tax protesters were typically convicted.)

Over the past half-century, organized tax resistance in the United States has been driven largely by conservative ideology, and has been less about reforming government than shrinking it—rearranging the tax code to favor capital over labor and corporations over people, and further enriching the rich.

Giving the finger to Trump’s IRS is tempting right now for both political reasons and purely selfish ones. Almost assuredly, more Americans will try to cheat this coming tax season, knowing that deep agency cuts by a Republican Congress and the Trump administration have rendered the IRS, yet again, relatively toothless. On the flipside, the administration reportedly aims to weaponize enforcement against individuals and progressive groups that threaten its authoritarian agenda, a development former IRS commissioner John Koskinen calls “very troubling.”

The administration’s lawlessness and Congress’ fecklessness have left many progressives feeling underrepresented—none more than the people of Arizona’s 7th congressional district, who elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva in a special election on September 23, yet have been waiting well over a month for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to seat her.

Even blue state residents with seated representatives are feeling salty. Trump, unlike any previous president, divides the public into loyalists and enemies and stands for his side only. He vilifies all who disagree with him and singles out Democratic strongholds for cuts, layoffs, hyperaggressive ICE enforcement, and other indignities. His has withheld billions in congressionally approved funding, a clear violation of the Impoundment Control Act. He has openly asked Justice Department officials to investigate his political foes—mainly Democrats, but also disloyal Republicans like James Comey and John Bolton—and the department, as recently as this week, has continued punishing career prosecutors who took on members of the violent mob that ransacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2020.

Could one successfully argue in court that all of this amounts to a kind of taxation without representation?

“I’d be very skeptical of that argument,” says our criminal tax defender, who, as a longtime DC resident, points out that the district’s license plates actually read: TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

“The tax law is the tax law,” he says, “and I don’t know that there’s an exception for political disagreement, even if your ox is getting gored.”

But perhaps there is a way to withhold federal taxes in good faith—like setting up an escrow account and depositing what is owed in it?

“That does not undo the crime,” he says. “I mean, it gives you an argument, if the government is thinking about prosecuting that person, to say, Look, do you really want to go to trial? Is a jury going to think that person is a greedy person who deserves to be convicted of a tax offense?”

Okay, well suppose, as some folks are suggesting on social media, that blue-state governors lead a tax revolt? If Gavin Newsom called on Californians to withhold federal taxes, would that insulate them from federal retribution?

“I don’t think so,” the lawyer says. “It would be no different than any other act of civil disobedience.”

Besides, he says, “the whole philosophical construct of civil disobedience is, you know, you’re going to violate the law and you’re prepared to accept the consequences,” our lawyer adds. “It would be a group of people saying we’re prepared to take the risk that we get prosecuted and go to jail, like the very brave young men and women in the South who violated the ordinances that said black people could not sit at the lunch counter.”

I can picture it now: Geese — Freedom Riders Tour.