03.19.26

Taxed for what?

I filed my taxes yesterday, about $4,700 on income that puts me in the second-to-lowest income quintile. I earned more this year — most of it in distributions from my IRA that I now pay taxes on — and paid less. I guess I benefited from the Trump tax cuts; the difference was around $400. The Trumps probably will pay less than me, if they pay anything at all.

It’s exasperating, always has been, paying US taxes, knowing how much of our money goes to prisons and corporate welfare and how little to parks and childcare. On balance, though, I’ve never resented it. Even when Biden was shipping trunks-full of shekels to Netanyahu to incinerate Gaza, we had OSHA and the CDC, the parks service and the Smithsonian, which was still allowed to mount exhibitions about slavery. Those things were worth paying for.

And I’m still content to throw in my share to New York State and the City. As federal domestic programs atrophy, we’ll be relying more and more on local government to feed the hungry, fight the polluters, and fill the potholes (on Substack, Chris Armitage keeps beating the drum for blue state secession, bless his heart).

In fact, if I could, I’d send my check (made out to NYC Finance, of course) tucked into a greeting card directly to Mayor Mamdani: “Happy April 15, Zoh! Warmest regards from a fellow tax-and-spend pinko.”

But these days, if I had the guts, I’d withhold my federal taxes. Back in February 2025, when DOGE had already fed huge chunks of the civil service into a wood chipper and Trump and his cronies were already raking in the ill-gotten gains, I wrote a piece for the Guardian headlined “It’s time for Americans to withhold their taxes.” Here’s a bit of it:

This is how kleptocracies work. Taxes are collected from the hoi polloi. The more benign government functions – housing the poor, postponing climate apocalypse – are abolished. But the rest of these functions do not entirely disappear. Rather, they are farmed out to private enterprise, which undertakes what it’s paid to do with minimum expense and maximum profit (and we all know corporations never commit waste, fraud or abuse).

Watchdogs are eliminated, bribery is legalized. The most corrupt carry off the greatest rewards. And bereft of revenue, social services wither, the infrastructure crumbles, and the prisons fill with the destitute and the resistant.

Ah, privatization! Ah, graft! Ah, collapsing bridges and mass incarceration! How innocent we were, 13 short months ago, before the kidnapping of immigrants, the murder of protesters, the imperialist raids and casual fomenting of world wars! Back then the Trump regime was only passively starving children to death. Now it’s deliberately killing them (or both: The UN warns that a protracted Middle East war, and with it choked-off food and oil supplies, will push 45 million people into acute hunger, in addition to the 319 million already suffering—bringing world hunger to an unprecedented level).

Aside from the paychecks of the few civil servants left at their jobs and the meager stream of Medicaid and SNAP still trickling from Washington, there’s little in the federal budget that doesn’t make a person want to eat their tax return (and the computer it’s filed on) and vomit the whole mess back onto Trump’s and Hegseth’s and Miller’s shoes. We can only hope that one day these thugs will be forced to refund our taxes with interest and pay restitution to all of humanity for their crimes against it.

Anyway, I invite you to read the Guardian piece. There’s no need to reconstruct it here.

And, I admit, talk is cheap. So I recommend this too, published last week in the Guardian, about Americans who are putting (or keeping) their money where their mouths are. These tax resisters are courageous; they risk serious consequences, including prison. If you can’t join them, join me in thanking them.