Some Chicagoans aren't paying federal taxes in protest of Trump policies

When Chicago attorney Rachel Cohen sat down to do her taxes earlier this year, she thought about the half dozen times she had been tear-gassed or struck with pepper pellets at protests against federal deportation tactics.

“I was thinking about my willingness to be hit with chemical weapons,” Cohen said. “And I couldn't square giving the federal government $10,000 with being willing to get arrested or put my body on the line.”

Cohen, an independent contract employee and Harvard-educated attorney, decided to file but not pay her federal taxes, instead putting the owed amount into a high-yield savings account and paying only her state taxes instead.

Protesting has long involved picketing, marches and even hunger strikes. But some Chicagoans, angered over the Trump administration’s tactics, are trying a different form of civil disobedience: not paying their federal taxes.

“War tax resistance” organizers say they’re seeing a barrage of new interest in their longstanding movement by people appalled at the federal government’s aggressive deportation efforts, U.S. support for Israel in the war in Gaza, and the U.S.-Israel war against Iran.

“The watershed moment was the invasion of Gaza with mostly U.S.-funded weapons,” said Lincoln Rice, a Milwaukee organizer with the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee who hasn’t paid most of his federal taxes since 1998. “It's been waves growing on waves. This definitely is our busiest tax season that I've witnessed.”

The group provides training on tax resistance and its consequences, measures interest by how many people go to their website or follow their social media. In 2018, the group had 157 followers on Instagram. Today, it has 42,000. Before the war in Gaza, the website had about 40,000 unique visitors a year, compared with 400,000 last year and 300,000 this year, Rice said.

In trainings, the group goes over the two main ways to protest taxes. It refers to one as “simple living,” when people lower their income by so much that they won’t owe federal taxes — roughly $16,000 for an individual.

“Any other way where you're resisting,” such as not paying your taxes at all, Rice said, “is always illegal. It's a form of civil disobedience. We want to make sure that's very clear to people.”

The consequences of not paying federal taxes can range from threatening letters from the Internal Revenue Service, to a monthly fine of up to 1% of the taxes owed. Consequences for not filing a federal tax return are worse, with a 5% fine attached. In extreme cases, tax protesters could face wage garnishment, property seizures or prison time, though criminal prosecutions are rare, according to University of Chicago law professor David Weisbach.

“They don't often do that, but they can. And so it's a form of civil disobedience that comes with all the consequences of civil disobedience, which is that you are subject to legal sanctions, and they can be quite severe,” Weisbach said. “It's certainly one way of protesting, but it's a risky way, and it could be a very, very costly way.”

Tax protest at ‘dire moment’

Cohen said she weighed the risks before deciding that, even though she is a lawyer, she would break the law and then publicize having done so on social media.

“I think that, particularly as a Harvard-educated white woman with a social media platform, it's really important that I do my research before I go and urge people to do something or, in this case, tell them about something that I'm doing because I've been very careful not to encourage other people to do tax resistance but to document why I'm doing it and the thought process,” she said.

Cohen has gained prominence for her pushback against President Donald Trump and his deportation campaign in the Chicago area. Her tax protest posts have gone viral, perhaps increasing the likelihood of being targeted by the IRS. For her, in an extreme case, that could mean disbarment, or losing the condo that she worked hard to own.

Still, Cohen said she feels it’s important to broadcast her choice. 

“A sentiment that I think is widely held is just kind of the question of why people aren't doing more. And I think we end up kind of gaslighting ourselves into thinking that the moment is not as dire as it is because, if it was so dire, people would be doing more.

“But I am somebody that spent my entire life working to get into these specific spaces, and I think that we are at such a dire moment that I am willing to give those things up. And, if you're wondering how dire the moment is, because it seems like nobody is reacting appropriately, I want people to know: I agree with you.”

Weisbach, who worked for the Treasury Department in the 1990s, said tax protests haven’t made much of a dent in the federal budget, half of which is earmarked for mandatory programs, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. About 13% of the budget goes toward military spending, though that figure rises when you take into account interest payments on war borrowing and health care costs for veterans, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Weisbach said the tax protest movement isn’t necessarily about making a dent in the federal budget.

“The whole point of civil disobedience is to change people's views about the matter,” he said. “Martin Luther King, that's what he did. They march on a bridge, they break the law, the law was unjust, and they changed people's views about race. But did he directly change a law? Not so much. He changed people's views, which caused laws to change.”

Budding resistance in Logan Square

At her home in Logan Square, Em Jacoby said she fields a couple of calls a week from people engaged in tax resistance. She runs a longstanding organization that helps protesters invest the money they would have paid in federal taxes. When the money earns interest, her group doles out grants to community organizations.

“Our Chicago resisters have been reaching out to increase their deposits,” Jacoby said. “Some of them were dormant for quite a while, and now they're reaching out and saying, ‘I'm really upset. I want to put more money in.’ ”

Last spring, Jacoby, who had never been a tax resister before, took over for an older woman who ran the group for 40 years.

“She trained me when she was still able to, and I literally picked up the documents from her really quaint, quirky apartment in Boston,” Jacoby said.

The group’s board members are in their 70s and 80s. Many in the movement joined to protest the war in Vietnam or, later, U.S. foreign policy in Iraq.

Rice joined after he saw then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a “60 Minutes” interview. Reports at the time estimated that up to half a million Iraqi children had died due to sanctions on the country, and Albright was asked whether that cost was worth the effort to thwart Saddam Hussein. She responded: “This is a very hard choice but… we think the price is worth it.”

“That was an eye-opening moment that… every administration is doing something that's so appalling that I cannot, in good conscience, see myself paying and supporting it,” Rice said.

War tax resistance started long before the internet — in people’s living rooms, where you had to know someone who was already doing it in order to get involved.

Jacoby has created an Instagram account in hopes of appealing to a new generation.

“This is our first try at social media, but we have been around since 1968,” a pinned post reads. “Stay tuned if you long for good trouble.”

This year, for the first time, Jacoby said she’s not paying federal taxes — in protest against the federal government’s actions abroad. She said her breaking point came after her young child had seen reports of bombing in Gaza, where more than 20,000 children have been killed, and had a pointed question:

“Hearing my 7-year-old say, ‘We're safe from the bombing here, aren't we, Mom?’ Just holding that and also knowing how much privilege it is that she can say that, I think that's what moves me.”