Is it moral and legally-diligent to pay taxes in the US?
<p>On the one hand, there is the ethical problem:  budgets are continually running deficits and there is a trillion dollar debt now.  You wouldn't give your kids money if they were being so irresponsible.</p>

<p>More to the point, if taxes go to buy bullets and kill people without a trial, are Americans being "responsible citizens" or performing illegal acts (like "aiding and abetting murder") in paying taxes?</p>

<p>There's also the issue of people's fear of the law.  But that's a topic for another time...</p>

<p>Don't even think of going there. If you refuse to pay taxes with this argument, the IRS will take this as a "frivolous tax return", and give you a fine of up to $5,000. If you are trying to argue that this is illegal, you only make things worse. </p>

<p>The IRS gets about 20,000 to 30,000 frivolous tax returns every year, so every argument you could come up with they have heard a dozen times. </p>

<p>This is less of a legal question and more of a moral one.  I'll just say that, in the Bible, when asked a somewhat similar question, Jesus said, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2012&amp;version=ESV" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."</a>  This did not mean Jesus condoned everything the Roman government was doing.  Quite the opposite.  But it does illustrate an important point:</p>

<p>Governments are not single human beings; they are run by many, many different people, who will not always govern the same way.  Some of those individuals are better than others.  Some are worse than others.  By the time a given tax dollar (or denarius) is filtered all the way down to a corrupt official's pockets, and by the time it is used to the end of corruption, the responsibility lies with the corrupt official(s), not with the taxpayer.</p>

<p>There are a lot of good things that come from governments, as well as evil.  Generally speaking, the evil that is performed by a government is not a central tenet of the purpose of that government's existence, and it is simply one or more individuals mishandling things on their own.  Granted, certain issues will be systemically rampant within a given government, but are they still blemishes on the design, not part of the design itself.  (There are exceptions, but the US government is not on that level.)  And much of a given tax dollar will also fund the good that a government is doing.  In the end, when somebody uses a government's treasury in an act of corruption, that is (<strong><em>generally</em></strong>) their responsibility, not the taxpayer's.</p>

<p>Once again, yours is less of a legal question and more of a moral one.</p>

tax-law political