Dreading Tax Day: Why our tax dollars should not be used for death and militarism, but for basic human needs

While Henry David Thoreau was sitting in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax because of his opposition to slavery and the US invasion/war against Mexico, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson asked “Why are you here?” Thoreau simply responded by saying, “Why aren’t you here?”

There is that old saying – the only things certain in life are death and paying taxes. I would like to amend this statement to say – if you are paying taxes then you are paying for the US military to kill civilians.

A great deal of our federal taxes are used to fund the US military, which always translates into the killing of civilians around the world. For example, in just the past 4 weeks because of the US military bombing of Iran the US has killed 3,636 Iranian people since the war erupted. The  U.S.-based rights group HRANA said 1,701 of those were civilians, including at least 254 children.

The US has been providing military aid and weapons to Israel for decades, but between October of 2023 and October of 2025 at least 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military.

According to a spokesperson for the National Priorities Project the average taxpayer shelled out over $4,000 for war and weapons last year. Put another way, you spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.

According to the War Resister League since WWII roughly 50 cents of every tax dollar goes to pay for the US military, which also includes paying off the cost of previous wars. This obsession for military spending is so entrenched in the US that regardless of who sits in the White House or which party controls Congress the US military budget keeps increasing from year to year. According to the National Priorities Project every hour, taxpayers in the United States are paying $116.43 million for Pentagon & War.

Let’s be honest, US military spending has complete and total bi-partisan support. So what can we do to oppose this reality and resist US militarism around the world?

First, we need to education ourselves on the cost of war/militarism by checking out sites like the National Priorities Project, the Cost of War Project and the War Resisters League.

Second, we have to stop voting for politicians who vote annually for the massive US military budgets. We also need to engage in massive resistance to these same politicians by disrupting business as usual and occupy their offices.

Third, we can withhold our federal tax dollars. You can find out how to do tax resistance by going to this link.

Fourth, anti-war movements need to not operate in silos, but connect to BIPOC led social movements, environmental justice & climate justice movements, racial justice movements, feminist movements, queer and trans movements and labor movements to see how US militarism is connected to all of these movements.

Fifth, we need to identify private military contractors in our community and begin campaigns to shut them down.

Sixth, we need to resist military recruiters in our communities, especially those that are given access to our schools in order to prey on our children and get them to join the US military.

Seventh, we have to build anti-war movements that have the capacity to disrupt business as usual and shut down systems of power if we truly want to reduced the brutality that is being done on a daily basis around the world in our name.

Eighth, at the local level a large percentage of our City and County taxes are used to fund the police, the Sheriff’s Department and the Kent County Jail, all of which are used to brutalize people in this community, particularly BIPOC communities, immigrants and those being left behind by Capitalism. We need to demand that the City of Grand Rapids, Kent County and the Grand Rapids School Board adopt participatory budgeting so that all residents can have a say in how our local tax dollars are being used.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his speech entitled Beyond Vietnam – “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”