About twenty years ago, I stopped paying U.S. federal income taxes. By law, the government has ten years to collect an unpaid tax bill, whereafter a sort of statute of limitations kicks in and the bill becomes permanently noncollectable. I’ve adopted the practice of waiting out this ten-year period and then donating the amount of the uncollected tax to charity, typically the Top Charities Fund organized by GiveWell.^[1] Over the past six years I’ve redirected over $30,000 from the U.S. Treasury to charity in this way.

In this post I’ll briefly outline the theory and practice of this sort of tax redirection, and address some likely objections. If you have questions about the nitty-gritty details, leave them in the comments or drop me a line by email.

Theory

From an effective altruism perspective, the theory behind tax redirection is that giving money to the government is far from the best way you could deploy that money. It is questionable whether funding the government is even a net positive: worse than merely wasteful and inefficient, the government is often harmful. But even if you believe that marginal funding of the government is more good than bad, it is almost certainly not among the best ways you could allocate your money.

So if you could avoid paying federal taxes and give that money instead to more well-chosen causes, in a frictionless way, it would seem wise to do so (from an effective altruism standpoint). But of course such a move is not frictionless: the government disincentivizes some varieties of tax redirection with threats of sanctions, and other varieties of tax redirection have their own costs.

So you have to factor in those costs before you can decide if tax redirection would be a good option for you. But to many people, tax redirection is in the “unthinkable” category, and so they dismiss the option before actually weighing the costs and benefits. If you have been among these people, I hope this post will encourage you to move tax redirection from “unthinkable” to “let me think about that for a moment.”

The theory and practice of tax redirection in the U.S. has been developed largely by pacifist “war tax resisters”, who redirect their federal taxes because of conscientious objection to funding war.^[2] Their belief that funding the government is indeed immoral led them to desperately seek alternatives. But those alternatives, having be...

David Bookstaber

David Bookstaber