As tensions escalate between California and the Trump administration over immigration, another potential battlefront is emerging over taxes.
The spat began with reports that the Trump administration is considering cutting funding for California’s university system, the largest higher education system in the nation with about 12% of all U.S. enrolled students.
In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote Friday afternoon in a social media post that California provides about $80 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in return.
“Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realDonaldTrump,” Newsom said.
Frankly I’d be surprised if anyone even does their taxes in this next cycle. Give dumpster nothing. Cut him off. Let congress figure out how their gonna pay the military and ICE and golf with their own dime to keep this shit up.
“Doing your taxes next cycle” just accounts for bonuses/corrections after reviewing taxes that had been paid through the year. It happens every paycheck.
Some people have very daringly chosen to withhold all taxes from each paycheck - there are legal reasons you might do this like “I plan to have a large tax write-off”, but without said reason, it’s very possible the IRS would come after you.
the govt doesn’t need money to spend it btw - this is how we got the national debt
this could affect something but not as much as youmight think
Most people have their federal tax withheld by their employers and do their taxes in order to get back their overpayment. Are we all going to not do our taxes and leave that overpayment in the government’s coffers? Are employers going to stop doing the withholding? Neither scenario is very likely.
Go to HR. Ask for a W-4, change withholding to $0.
That’s only going to cause little people more problems as they get audited. The thought is nice but no way would the feds pass up the opportunity to ruin people’s lives for this.
And it’s not like withholding some tax revenues would have any effect on Republican spending. Despite their bullshit “fiscal conservatism” rhetoric, they’ve had no qualms whatsoever about running enormous deficits for more than half a century now. A tax strike would just produce more debt and give Republicans ammo to blame it all on Democrats.
They’ve actually run those deficits up very intentionally. If you aren’t familiar with the Two Santas Strategy, this is worth a read:
The IRS can change it back via a “lock in letter”.
Well it is a good thing then that DOGE fired the IRS
I hope people reading this aren’t taking this advice seriously… The IRS will fuck you up. They have less funding, but that only means that they only go after low hanging fruit (AKA people who can’t afford a team of lawyers to fight). They’ll garnish your fucking wages.
Kinda crazy that the comment is so highly upvoted… I get the sentiment, but you’re giving people really bad advice here.
Nice try Steve miller. Go jump up your butt.
OK, go ahead and change your withholding to $0 and see what happens. Publicly announcing your intentions to stop paying federal taxes will definitely help as well.
I do zero withholding every year because I get a higher return by investing it. And I’ve been openly posting about tax resistance for years. It’d be a lot more realistic if my whole state was on board!
I meant “do zero withholding, and then don’t file taxes” as that was the implication.
I know what tax resistance is, I’m just talking about the (very real) consequences that people better be ready for if they take that advice.
DOGE already scrapped the IRS
You think the IRS doesn’t exist anymore? You think that the federal government is just going to stop collecting taxes?
Lol.
Stop whining. She left you for Elon. And it’s entirely justified with how much of an asshole you are. Just think how big of a loser you are to make him the winner.
She left you for Elon.
Lol what. Are you doin ok, buddy?
Idk, the author of “Civil Disobedience” did it. It’s a valid resistance method, or just a way to keep yourself morally consistent. Every kind of resistance has a good chance of bringing harm to yourself.
I personally didn’t file one year; kinda just kept putting it off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay my taxes (was a 1099 worker, and suffered some major financial blows that year); nothing ever happened, but it definitely was a risk. I probably won’t do that as an “act of resistance” next year, but will probably try extending as long as possible.
I mean yeah, you can do it… But you’re going to accomplish literally nothing and there’s a good chance that it will cause you much distress.
For people like me who have some savings and investments but don’t want to run afoul of the law - Just take a couple years off. I’m working part time to cover my cost of living, and I’m not investing. So minimizing what I pay in income tax and taxes on dividends.
You wont win against Trump going to Open war with him, this is just Madness and nonsense. Start using your brains and stop doing shit for the photos on Instagram
So how can you win without fighting back?
this isn’t open war
this is money moving arround
open war is open war
Can anyone explain what this even means? Like W2 taxes go directly from employer to federal right? What kind of control can California actually do to stop monetary flow to the federal government?
Or would everyone have to manually adjust their W2 withholdings to boycott?
I guess it would be something like “Don’t pay your federal taxes, Californians, we will not cooperate with the federal government if they try to collect.”
Feel free to join Canada my friends.
I remember seeing it as “america” vs “dumbfuckistan”
Breaks down when you start seeing all the blueberries in the ketchup and you realize that’s where huge portions of the population actually live.
So much of that red state territory is vacant real estate. A big chunk more is functionally disenfranchised (Indian reservations, migrant labor communities, large prison populations).
This illustrates regions of political control. But it is in no way reflective of homogeneous popular opinion.
Shit, even doing shades of purple without getting more granular than the state level would change the map drastically. This winner take all bullshit is the dumbest part of the electoral college.
America needs ranked choice voting. Unfortunately the GOP has been banning it in every state they can.
I would really like to come visit if the road border near Detroit is still relatively safe. My passport and driver’s license have the same name and gender so I might have a chance.
They might still get you on skin colour, ethno-linguistic origin of name, left-wing political affiliations, religious affiliations (or lack thereof), type of employment or specific employer, perceived accent, or a boarder agent just having a very bad or a very good day.
I’m neither rich nor skilled enough :( If I was I’d be up there like yesterday
I’m not mad at this at all I’m thrilled a politician is actually fighting back. He has a history of standing up against trump and the gop status quo
That said this is the first time there is any bite to it and the cynic/realist in me is saying it’s cause he is gearing up for presidential nomination and election. I really hope he is not the Democrat choice.
if the good wife/fight taught me anything the democrats already have someone picked out and priming public for itI just wish we had Bernie i wanna see that timline :'(
I want the timeline where Carter won a second term and the Christian nationalists funding Reagan realized their plan didn’t work and give up on it.
Just reminded me of “Sliders”…
i want the timeline where harris won lol
Harris lost before she ran. Not that she was a strong candidate, but the Dems could have ran literal Jesus, Trump was going to come back either way as long as big money was in politics. Maybe if they ran someone who at least promised change, they could have staved off Trump for another 4 years. Would they have sentenced him in another 4 years? Would anyone been able to get people like Thiel and Musk out of politics?
This will get worse before it gets better. I just hope most of it stays contained in the US.
Trump’s health has been declining pretty rapidly, especially his mental health. I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t make it to the end of this term. And if he does I’m not sure he’d be mentally capable of running in 2028
And what precedent does it set for US civil society that he was allowed to get away with it? This shit is poison to a free civil society.
Unfortunately, they tend to try harder when it doesn’t work the first time. The first attempts at the Prosperity Gospel, prior to WWII, were laughed off because it was so obviously self-serving to rich people. They kept at it until it stuck.
Or how about a timeline where we didn’t immediately give up on
RestorationReconstruction after the Civil WarEDIT: derp.
You’re thinking of Reconstruction. Restoration is just a worthless school of magic.
Lol derp. Fixed.
If history has taught me anything, the dems will run schumer.
No way, Amy Schumer?!!1?
But yeah history is better data than the good wife lol
Fucking do it. I’ll cum buckets.
I don’t think there’s really a way to do this, since federal taxes are paid directly to the fed without state involvement. This is just to poke the bear, which I am all for.
Companies, no. But the state employs a lot of people.
Still, the feds will come after the individuals, not the state.
And county, and cities
Yeah, given his history and it’s pretty fair to assume Trump doesn’t know that
I thought you were going to talk about the physical improbability of cumming buckets.
This is a test comment. Will delete.
The hypothetical way to do it is severely penalize companies within California that pay federal tax. Make it so financially burdonsome they have to relocate or stop paying federal tax of their own accord. This is just what’s been suggested before when this has come up.
Good. Keep poking until he has a heart attack. If he recovers, rinse and repeat until we get it right.
I’m all for it too, but keep in mind that successors to dictators are never better; only worse. It only ever gets worse.
~Hide your kids. Hide your couch!~
Yeah but there seems to be something about this fucking guy. I don’t think his successor will have the same draw.
This dictator is the leader of the GOP, a cult of personality. That’s not easily replaced
This dictator is merely a puppet; plain and simple. The real Palpatine is someone else. Maybe it’s Putin, or maybe it’s Thiel. We haven’t gotten to that episode yet.
But this puppet is who the cultists at the bottom support. They won’t get their support for anyone else so easily, if they even need them at that point.
I would argue that now that the GOP has all three branches of government, Darth Trump is expendable.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m afraid I agree. I’m not sure how you could enforce this. Paying federal tax seems like a personal choice and the consequences would be felt by individuals (tax evasion charges, unless trump manages to get it treated as a terrorist act). I’d be interested to see if the state was actually offering to shield CA citizens from being arrested by federal agents or subpoenaed by federal courts.
Also, for the most part the Fed already has our money, right? The majority of that federal tax is withheld from paychecks and goes directly to the Fed…
You can withhold paying your federal taxes from your paycheck. Most people don’t because they don’t want to get stuck with a big tax bill in April with no way to pay it if they spent that money or lost it on a bad investment. if enough people all did that at once, regardless of state, it could put a big financial burden on Trump. The government heavily relies on this steady source of income, and unless you make a lot of money, you are probably getting a federal return every year, which means you gave the U.S. Government an interest free loan of sorts.
You also get hit with an underpayment penalty if you do this and don’t pay estimated taxes too.
I don’t think I want a bucket coming out if that particular hole.
Prude.
Sounds painful.
It’ll be like a firehose connected to a main
Be sure to hydrate if you do.
One thing that might be misunderstood here is that California not paying taxes wouldn’t harm Trump. Trump’s goal, made clear from a sum of lots of behaviors, is the destruction of the United States. Defaulting on its debt, zeroing its GDP, destroying the livelihood of its inhabitants, and ultimately killing its war machine, so that they can’t fight Putin’s army. California’s lack of payment may just hasten that goal.
I don’t think he is a puppet of Putin. I think he really, really likes money and power, that’s it. He does things to further his own grip of the country, thus increasing his power. Or, he does things to increase his wealth. Nothing more. He likes authoritarian leaders because they have more of a hold on their respective countries (a weird form of respect), or because they give him money (or expensive planes).
But if it’s not Putin’s fault,
- US people would have to face the reality that there’s stupid people among them
- and there’d be no “external threat” to distract from internal problems!
They’ll find a way to blame someone or something else. Cognitive dissonance and all.
It might put California on the track to surviving Trump’s destruction and becoming a civilized country opposed to Putin, unlike other US states.
I don’t think Trump is as much of a lackey that’s following the plan as he is a useful idiot that’s easy to manipulate. I believe that Trump believes that the US is the biggest and the best - it suits the same image he has of himself as the biggest and best leader - but he’s so dumb and narcissistic that he won’t realize that he’s being led on a leash.
I don’t think Trump consciously wants to destroy America, I think he wants to make it what he considers to be great (a militarily powerful dictatorship built on worshiping him), but he’s absolutely fine with making it weaker in the interim if it either:
A. Makes him gain something
B. Feeds his ego
In just two days I got my answer.
Trumptard is really really really really trying to start a civil war. Amazing :/
Hasn’t actually happened yet though.
well it IS taco Tuesday
What is a donor state?
Indeed, cbsnews. What is a “donor state”?
Maybe if you could use that term a few dozen more times, other outlets could pick it up and it would eventually back up into Fox News’ talking points where they’d have to either lie utterly, or risk their viewers’ comprehension that red states take money from blue states. Charity, let’s say. MAGA heads would temporarily be offline.
YES
I don’t like Gavin Newsom, but I really hope he does this. It would be so funny 🥲
I won’t be holding my breath, but it would be hilarious.
I’d definently like him a lot more if he did
I don’t know how this would work, but do it.
I don’t expect Governor Greaseball to follow though, but I would wholeheartedly support this. And secession. I’d also support secession.
Iirc, California is like the 5th largest economy in the world. Secession sounds like a great way to crash the US economy.
To that I say:
Don’t worry, we are already on track for that.
The only reason some states aren’t considered third-world is because of the federal system, a fact they so often forget.
Like Vermont ranked at 147th as the lowest GDP state? Or Wyoming at 141?
That’s not compassion to talk about other states like they are mooching off of others but condescension, and we wonder why they are upset. Everybody benefits from the federal budget and the things that make us 3rd world like lack of healthcare and low pay is felt by all types of states.
Fourth largest, Texas is eighth.
And a lot of it is tech that can leave state if it needed to
Shutting off the American food supply is the bigger play
Yeah if California secedes, fruits, nuts, and vegetables would get a whole lot more expensive for the rest of the country… something like half of our produce comes from California.
You know what is wild?
The US is the largest economy on the world, and if you remove California from it at #4 the US moves to…
#1 still. Several states make up the top 25 list of GDPs and the total combined is absurd.The US is just massive in scale. It’s fully running the global empire still even if it’s waning. I do think losing California would be a massive hit for lots of reasons but just wild to think about.
GDP does not indicate how big an economy is, it measures how many dollars trade hands in it.
So there are two things about this:
One is that the reason the US GDP is so high is because of price and wage inflation in the service industry that makes up most of it. And I mean white-collar services like software devs, management consultants, doctors and lawyers and the like. It’s a lot of made up money that goes nowhere, you pay a US software engineer twice as much as someone in the EU just for them to have less disposable income PPP than someone in the EU as that extra money ends up with landlords, banks and insurance companies. It’s a shell game that boosts figures.
Two, that shell game is held up by everyone trusting the dollar. Trump is eroding that precise trust, and a Calexit would be another hit to that. Do you know how much the US owes? It doesn’t matter as long as the dollar is king, and I would not have bet against the dollar last year, but it seems like Trump is betting against it and winning. And when everyone is convinced Wall Street is not a safe haven for your money because Trump will just steal it, then that premium on the US GDP will just evaporate, along with a sizeable chunk of the world economy.
Here’s hoping the world lets the US down gently for its own sake.
Yes.
Seriously get paid double and actually have less than a worker in another country since we have to pay for each single piece of life separately at retail prices.
And 2… Yeesh yeah. Literally stocks just keep going up cause the value of the dollar is lowering and nobody knows where to put it to keep it safe other than the stock market… And it does feel like it’s gonna get robbed at some point.
So agreed, just think it’s wild that there is enough money hoarding and spending in any state in the US to beat out lots of countries for GDP and sets the US as the battery that powers the global economy at our pain. I do hope we just drain the battery rather than light it on fire.
I’m not a fan of Newsom, but get it dude.
Ok, this is an idea I had after reading numerous comments on this post. You’re all asking how this would work … hear me out.
California declares its own currency, the “California dollar”. Wages earned in California dollars wouldn’t be taxed like US Dollars.
There are some issues to work out; I think the IRS does tax your foreign assets … some … but I think that this scheme could work.
Economically, it would be an uphill battle. The US dollar is strong because it’s backed by decades of sound monetary policy (that will go right out the window when jerome powell’s tenure is up) and a AAA credit rating for treasury bonds (that will disappear when the Republicans in congress finally drive us off a cliff) . A Californian dollar would be untrustworthy for a while as its central bank would need time to build trust
What if they got into a monetary union with Canada and linked Calidollar with the Canadollar with the same value and entirely interchangeable the way the Belgian and Luxemburg franc used to work?
Could provide legitimacy, but when currencies cross borders it becomes more difficult to manage them politically. The Euro is messy because monetary policy that helps Germany may not help Italy
Soundish monetary policy. In the end it’s a fallacy that has never even been tried on a theoretical level. We just did it and people were like, ok. We’ve been kept afloat by monetary and military threats. The policy makes no sense on any level, that infinite debt is perfectly fine or normal.
Do it! Sink this economy! TACO!
