Taxes

Trump's Illegal War in Iran Is Financed by Your Taxes. That's a Good Reason To Stop Paying Them.

If Congress will not deploy the power of the purse to restrain a lawless administration and an illegal war, then it falls to the public to do so.

Eric Boehm | 4.15.2026 11:15 AM

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(https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf)

This Tax Day, America needs a tax revolt.

The executive branch is out of control. We're now more than six weeks into a deeply unpopular, unnecessary war with Iran that lacks any semblance of congressional authorization. The Trump administration has sent masked, unaccountable goons into American cities, where they have harassed and arrested innocent people and killed multiple times. President Donald Trump's signature economic policy is an illegal tax increase that his administration is refusing to refund.

Congress has been unwilling or unable to stop these unlawful actions. If legislators will not deploy "the power of the purse," then it falls to the rest of us to do something.

That's why I have stopped paying the federal income tax. I'm not the only one doing it. I think you should, too.

What can this accomplish? I'm not naive enough to believe that my paltry contribution to the federal coffers matters much—I just finished filing my 2025 taxes and paid a sum in the low-five-figures. This is, first and foremost, a moral calculation rather than a fiscal one.

It's roughly the same conclusion that Henry David Thoreau reached when he looked at a federal government waging an unnecessary, unpopular war abroad and violently suppressing fundamental rights at home. "What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn," he concluded.

There is probably never a bad time to revisit Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (or to read it for the first time). The essay, first published in 1849, was a response to the then-ongoing Mexican-American War and the state-level debates over policies similar to what would eventually........

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