(regarding one of those toots I boosted recently)
The idea that a plebeian, or even a group of plebs, can "protest" by collectively not paying taxes, in response to the rich not paying taxes?
Is dumbfounding.
If the rich are abusing their power?
It isn't going to rectify the situation if the poor follow suit and imitate.
Noam Chomsky I think pays half his share of taxes or something in protest?
"The only respect in which I have personally gone any further is in refusal to pay half of my income tax last year, and again, this year." (citation:
https://chomsky.info/19670323/)
Do you comprehend what an extreme level of privilege Noam Chomsky operates at? He's "a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
He is not a plebeian. He's a world authority.
Maybe, when Noam Chomsky, abstains from paying half of his income tax and documents it publicly, it sends a message?
If the poor stop paying their taxes, it will accelerate collapse of the government, and that will come back to hurt the poor and disenfranchised even more than they are already hurting.
That's the
problem with the rich and privileged abusing their powers.
The "fix" is for the rich to stop getting special exceptional treatment and to acknowledge that they are a part of the whole, and when they fail to do their part, the failings are felt much more widely.
Encouraging the poor to stop paying taxes just feels as if it is the end game of Reaganomics.
If you want to repair a broken society, and the rich and powerful aren't buying in? Time to rise up and force the rich to pay in or face the consequences. That was sort of the entire m.o. of the French Revolution, wasn't it?