Tag: State Power

Previously I started playing with the idea of a “State Office of Federal Tax Fulfillment”. The basic idea is that I would pay my federal taxes, but they would be routed through a state office that holds them temporarily, before forwarding my payment through to the federal government. The purpose is so that if we wanted to, as a state, we could collectively withhold our taxes.

We wouldn’t really even need everyone in the state to do it. It could be a voluntary system, perhaps with a minimum level of adoption before any potential withholding takes place. For instance, here in California, maybe nothing happens unless 16 million people enroll in the system (40% of the state, just to pick a random amount). Once that number is reached, we could collectively vote on whether the 16 million of us want our taxes sent through.

We would of course be assuming some risk, since the federal government could still come after us individually, but in this example, they would have to be coming after 16 million of us.

To extend this idea even further though, what if other states also adopted these measures? We could all work together to withhold our contributions in a unified voice if we desired to do so, increasing the power of the action, and reducing the risk to each individual tax payer.

I see comments online that we should all stop paying federal taxes (in response to the new military presence in our nation’s cities, a masked and un-uniformed police force rounding people up off the streets, withholding funds to blue states for green energy programs, using the powers of government to go after political enemies, etc..). This isn’t really feasible, since we all have to pay taxes individually, and since there are severe penalties involved, the likelihood of us all acting together on this are pretty slim.

Perhaps it was brilliant design, to limit the power of states (or other jurisdictions) in this way, but I wonder if there are some exploits that could be made to make it possible. (And I’ll admit here that there are probably many problems with this next idea, but a central idea of this blog is to push further into these thoughts that are potentially dead-ends).

A Unified Release of Tax Returns

States could potentially create a mechanism for releasing everyone’s individual tax returns at once. For instance, here in California we could enact a “State Office of Federal Tax Fulfillment”. That office’s responsibility is to basically do your federal taxes for you . This could be outsourced to existing tax professionals, or perhaps we would do taxes as we do now, they just get routed through this office for final release to the federal government. The central idea is just that the taxes are still coming from you, they’re just finally “released” by the state organization, but they are released together at the direction of the state government.

This would give states more power to withhold those funds collectively if residents aren’t feeling as though their money is being used well.

Of course, there are plenty of problems with this — the federal government could still go after individual tax payers, so I’m not sure what protections could be put in place (or loopholes to be exploited) to mitigate that danger, other than for a state like California, there would be 39 million of them. And you’re right, this very well could spell the end of America if all states did this (which they would). And for the record, I’m all for paying taxes, and we (those who make more than most), should probably be paying more, but perhaps taxes could be a larger leveraging tool for making the nation better.