In April of 2026, we might all consider not paying our federal taxes and continue to do so until Congress gives the United States a fair and progressive tax code that does not increase taxes on anyone making $150k/year or less and exempts taxation of income on all income of individuals and families at or below the poverty line.
Instead of paying federal taxes as is normal in April of 2026 and beyond, due to the current unjust political taxation as it is currently established and implemented, we could instead have our taxes prepared and filed as usual and all penalties for non-payment of taxes during the boycott are waived until Congress produces a new progressive and fair tax code, and pay only state taxes but not pay federal taxes until the following demands are met:
A new tax code that ends tax breaks for the rich and adds additional tax brackets to tax ALL upper levels of income.
Restores IRS funding, staffing, and functioning to Biden administration levels.
Fair and progressive taxation on all corporate income and the elimination of exemptions, waivers, exceptions with enforcement penalties for non-payment of taxes.
Automatic auditing and taxation of all overseas tax haven accounts and closing all loopholes and preferential treatment of expatriated wealth.
A one time inheritance tax as proposed by Elizabeth Warren.
A tax on all securities and stock transactions.
A review of all federal subsidies and the elimination of all subsidies to profitable corporations.
Convert federal subsidies in the Farm Bill that pay for monoculture crops and use it to pay for Restorative Agricultural farming/ranching which would also greatly mitigate climate change and greatly improve a carbon sink back into our soil.
Give it some thought. A tax boycott might be able to help us get Congress to do what it has needed to do for a long time: Give us a fair and progressive tax code.
If you do not like what the government is doing under Trump/Musk and the republican party, next year, in April of 2026, for the 2025 tax year, if you can, please consider not paying your taxes.
If enough people do not pay taxes and it truly gets the attention of Congress, it could serve as incentive for Congress to rewrite the tax code; a tax code that is fair and does not increase the tax on people making less than 400k a year but taxes all upper levels of income, imposes a responsible corporate tax burden, cuts wasteful and fraudulent subsidies, waivers, exclusions, limits, creates more tax brackets for the upper levels of income that have not been adequately taxed since the 1970s, closes tax shelter loopholes and offshore tax-free havens by making them taxable accounts, we would finally have the tax code that is fair that we need.
There are penalties for not filing your taxes at tax time. Filing your taxes prevents having to pay penalties for not filing them. The two options are filing, or not filing your taxes.
There are late fee penalties if you don’t pay your taxes.
If enough people do not pay their taxes that it gets the attention of Congress and makes Congress realize that it has to do something and fix the tax code, penalties for not filing taxes and for not paying them during a boycott should be rescinded. But this needs to be a condition that is understood by Congress by the people not paying taxes until there is a new fair tax code in place. We, the people, we, the tax payers, can resume paying our taxes as we have always done, after we have a fair tax code and when we have a guarantee from Congress that there will be no penalties for having not filed or paid taxes until then, however many years that may take.
Not paying taxes for as long as it takes to get Congress to rewrite a new fair tax code could take a long time. It may take years. However, not paying taxes for one, or two, or more years until we have a fair tax code, if we end up with a fair tax code, would be worthwhile.
Wall Street and the Republican Party have been attempting to defund, weaken, and dismantle these social programs for decades. They now have Trump as an ally to try to wipe out those programs. They call these programs entitlements and claim that they are the cause of the federal deficit which is a lie.
Another lie is that Wall Street, the Republican Party, and Trump do not state that these programs are paid for by Americans through a payroll tax that they pay for every hour they work for their entire working lives. American workers have paid for these programs. It is their money that they have paid into the Social Security Trust fund through the taxes that they have paid their entire working lives. It is a lie when Republicans make claims that imply that these programs are some kind of communist or socialist plot. These programs are a social safety net for retirement. It is a lie to imply that American workers have not worked and paid for every cent that they have paid in income taxes that go directly into these funds and that it is not their money. That is the most insulting lie of all.
Social Security itself is not part of the federal budget. It is its own self-sustaing fund and is only strained financially and under threat of insolvency because it has a cap on the upper levels of income to generate revenue. It is a lie when someone implies that the funding of Social Security and Medicare is part of the federal budget. Those funds are funded by worker contributions in the form of the income taxes they pay for their entire working lives.
The problem with insolvency of Social Security is only a problem that exists because all income above $176,100 is not taxed. In other words, a person who makes more than that income is not taxed for any additional income above that amount. That is about 15% of tax payers. That means that, for example, a person who has an income of $5 million is not taxed for social security above $176,100. Approximately 15% of the population has an income of more than $176,000.00 a year and are not taxed on any more than the first $176,100.00 of that income. There is an easy two-part fix that would solve the problem of insolvency of Social Security. New taxes on upper levels of income which can be done in a progressive way so that as income increases, so does the tax rate. This incremental increase in taxes could be fair and not be a burden to all tax brackets but it would also ensure that the upper levels of income are fairly taxed as the lower levels of income are and have always been taxed. Since Ronald Reagan cut income taxes for the wealthy from 70% to 28% in the 1980s, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have all experienced financial strain by insufficient generation of revenue and that financial strain is what puts stress on the economy, not the programs themselves. The second part of solving the insolvency of Social Security is that Congress must repay the more than a trillion dollars it has “borrowed” from the Social Security Trust fund to pay for wars that Congress neglected to find other ways to pay for other than to “borrow” money from Social Security and promise to pay back. Congress needs to pay its IOUs to the Social Security Trust Fund.
Millions of Americans who have paid into Social Security and Medicare all their working lives depend solely on these programs to have a very modest income and healthcare in their retirement years. Congressional Republicans want to take that away from them. The Republican Party does not care about what happens to people when they have nothing and are left destitute. The Republican Party apparently does not care when these people may starve, not have enough money to pay for a place to live, and get sick and die because they have no income or healthcare.
All working Americans deserve a dignified retirement. They have worked hard for it for their entire lives. Congress needs to keep its hands off of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid except for making them solvent and increasing benefits so that they more closely match what is needed to keep up with the actual cost of living. If Congress threatens to tamper with these programs, it will have to deal with the response.
Each year the President’s annual proposed federal budget is sent to Congress from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for both houses of Congress to consider and for each to write its own appropriations bill. After one house finishes its appropriations bill it sends it to the other house of Congress. Both bills are considered by both houses of Congress, and a final bill is written by both houses and then sent to the President for a signature. When the final appropriations bill is finished and sent to the WH for the President’s signature, the OMB makes final decisions about the agencies’ proposed budgets and in that way the appropriations bill is distributed.
High-Income taxpayers paid the majority of federal Income Taxes. In 2021, the bottom half of taxpayers earned 10.4 percent of total AGI and paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 1 percent earned 26.3 percent of total AGI and paid 45.8 percent of all federal income taxes. March 13, 2024. (Adjusted gross income, also known as (AGI), is defined as total income minus deductions, or “adjustments” to income that you are eligible to take.
Taken as a whole, the federal income tax is progressive, meaning that those with higher incomes pay at higher rates. But the system’s progressivity tends to break down at the very uppermost income levels. (I would argue that progressivity tends to break down starting with incomes from $1 million and higher. See my opinion notes at the end of the essay.)
Average effective tax rates, defined here as total income tax as a percentage of AGI, were highest among taxpayers with AGIs between $2 million and $10 million (nearly 28%). The average effective tax rate for taxpayers with AGIs of $10 million or more was lower (25.5%), mainly because they tend to get more of their income from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at lower rates than wages, salaries and other so-called “ordinary income.”
Corporate tax brings in smaller share of federal revenues
Although the focus this time of year is on individual income taxes, corporate income taxes are also a significant source of federal revenue. This year, the Office of Management and Budget projects that the government will collect $546 billion in corporate taxes, or 11.4% of estimated total receipts. That’s less than half the corporate-tax share of total revenues that prevailed in the 1950s.
Several big corporations, including Amazon, Nike and FedEx, have come under fire in recent years for paying little to no income tax. But comparing corporate and individual income taxes is tricky. For one thing, corporations can report income and taxes differently to the IRS than they do publicly to investors. They can also spread losses in a given year across several years’ worth of taxes – meaning, in effect, that taxes due on this year’s profits can be offset by a previous year’s losses.
Besides average effective tax rates, another way to look at the relative burden on different groups of taxpayers is by examining how much of the total bill they foot.
The IRS collected $1.66 trillion in individual income taxes in 2020 (excluding the $78.6 billion in negative tax liabilities referred to earlier). Close to 54% of that sum came from taxpayers with AGIs between $100,000 and $1 million – a group that accounted for just under a fifth of all returns filed (31.3 million), and about 30% of all taxable returns (31 million).
At the very top of the income ladder, only 0.02% of all returns filed in 2020 showed AGIs of $10 million or more, but those taxpayers collectively paid $210.2 billion in taxes after refundable tax credits, or 12.6% of total individual income tax collections.
Tax rate
Single
Head of household
Married filing jointly or qualifying widow
Married filing separately
Source: IRS
10%
$0 to $11,600
$0 to $16,550
$0 to $23,200
$0 to $11,600
12%
$11,601 to $47,150
$16,551 to $63,100
$23,201 to $94,300
$11,601 to $47,150
22%
$47,151 to $100,525
$63,101 to $100,500
$94,301 to $201,050
$47,151 to $100,525
24%
$100,526 to $191,950
$100,501 to $191,950
$201,051 to $383,900
$100,526 to $191,950
32%
$191,951 to $243,725
$191,951 to $243,700
$383,901 to $487,450
$191,951 to $243,725
35%
$243,726 to $609,350
$243,701 to $609,350
$487,451 to $731,200
$243,726 to $365,600
37%
$609,351 or more
$609,351 or more
$731,201 or more
$365,601 or more
Here’s how that works for a single person with taxable income of $58,000 per year:
$58,000 to $44,725 taxed at 22%
$44,725 to $11,000 taxed at 12%
$11,000 to $0 taxed at 10%
The highest tax bracket is 37%. In 2023, for single filers, it applies to incomes over $578,126, and for married couples filing jointly, it applies to incomes over $693,751. Income exceeding these thresholds is taxed at a 37% rate.
The rules governing what constitutes business or individual income, and how it should be taxed, are only part of what makes the U.S. tax code as complex as it is. One rough measure of that complexity: The printed version of the 2021 edition of the Internal Revenue Code runs a total of 4,074 pages, excluding front matter. More than half of those pages (2,448) are devoted to the income tax.
The following is my opinion about the Federal Tax Code as it is currently composed and the questions I have about it. These are also my criticisms of the tax code and how I believe it could be improved to make it a truly progressive tax code.
Income of $578,126 for a single filer and $693,751 for married couples filing jointly, and up, are taxed at the maximum tax bracket of 37%. That is the top tax bracket in the Federal tax code. Income above these sums is taxed 37%.
The bottom half of taxpayers had an income of 10.4% of total AGI and paid 2.3 % of all federal individual income taxes. Taxpayers with AGIs between $100,000 and $1 million made up about 30% of all taxable returns and paid 54% of the income taxes collected. These taxpayers make up about 30% of taxpayers but pay about 54% of the tax bill. Adjustments should be made so that perhaps this group has a tax burden of closer to 30%, the approximate percentage of taxpayers, instead of the 54% they pay now. Taxpayers with income between $1 million and $10 million paid approximately 31% of total individual income tax collection. Taxpayers with an income of $10 million or more made up 0.02% of taxpayers and in the 37% tax bracket paid 12.6% of total individual income tax collections. The discrepancies that exist from one group to the others begs the question of whether the tax burden is equally and fairly shared among all income groups and all tax brackets. A fairer tax code would have more tax brackets for the higher incomes. The total income tax collected on incomes above $10 million should be higher than 12.6%. It should be higher than the other brackets. The tax burden on income from $1 million to $10 million should remain higher than lower tax bracket groups but perhaps slightly lower than they currently are. It’s not rocket science. It’s a matter of fairness with higher incomes paying progressively higher taxes. And with all income, especially at higher levels, being taxed fairly.
Other considerations and changes that should be made are that capital gains and dividends should be taxed as income in corresponding tax brackets; in other words, capital gains and dividends should be taxed like “ordinary” income.
Corporations should be taxed at consistent rates and should not be allowed to pay little or no taxes. After all, corporations are people too. So, like the rest of the people who pay their taxes, corporations should also pay their fair share of taxes. Corporate income taxes should be uniform and consistent. Back taxes or unpaid taxes should be recovered.
I would welcome comments, criticism, and corrections, and further discussion to develop a more comprehensive picture of the tax code and how it can be improved. So, please, feel free to chime in.
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