For more than half a century, Joanne Sheehan has refused to give her tax dollars to the U.S. to pay for war. The 76-year-old trainer in nonviolent civil disobedience moved from New York City to Norwich, Conn., in the 1970s, just to make it easier for her to protest the company that builds nu clear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Sheehan has been arrested many times for her activism. Her first arrest was in 1971, when she and fellow tax resisters blockaded the doors of an Internal Revenue Service office to protest the Vietnam War. In 1976, when the IRS came calling after Sheehan refused to pay a 10 percent federal tax on her phone bill, she was already behind bars for a different nonviolent action at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. The IRS agent left a business card. Sheehan called the agent when she got out of jail to explain her tax resistance. "They never did get the money," Sheehan said with glee. She was never prosecuted. Sheehan, who cofounded the New England regional office of the War Resisters League and runs it out of her Norwich home, is probably what most people think of when they hear the words "tax resister": a white-haired hippie who has devoted her life to nonviolent activism for lefty causes. But amid recent political strife in the U.S. and globally, including in Vermont, a new generation is dissenting by choosing not to pay taxes. Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro has been a tax resister for about a decade. For the first few years, the 42-year-old nonprofit administrator refused to pay a portion of her federal income taxes and would send letters to the IRS and Vermont's congressional delegation explaining her justification. She now resists by reducing her income below a federally taxable level by working part time, growing some of her own food, and bartering with friends and neighbors. Paying taxes, Britt wrote to the IRS in 2023, supports the government in "killing people, destroying communities, decimating the natural world, and causing a never-ending cycle of trauma." Except for when the feds withheld a portion of her federal stimulus check during the pandemic, Britt has never faced legal or financial consequences for her civil disobedience. These days, most tax resisters don't get penalized, which should come as comforting news to the thousands of Americans who have been exploring this form… ...read more read less