Michael Bowman, a 53-year-old Oregon man, hasn’t voluntarily paid a dime in federal income taxes since 1999.
And he just won a major court case.
Bowman says he’d love to fork over some of his hard-earned paycheck and live like a “normal person,” but can’t do so in good conscience because the government continues to pour millions of tax dollars into Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. According to him, voluntarily paying federal taxes would be like funneling cash to the Nazis so they can exterminate the Jews.
But Bowman says he’s always been up-front with the federal government about his stance, and hasn’t lied or tried to hide the fact that he refuses to pay taxes until Congress stops dumping money into abortion clinics. So far, he’s racked up more than $350,000 in unpaid federal income tax on about $800,000 worth of income.
The federal government obviously disagrees with Bowman’s decision, and started garnishing Bowman’s wages from his checking account. So the self-employed software developer started cashing out all his paychecks instead of leaving his money in the bank.
The feds argued in court that by cashing out his own paycheck, Bowman was intentionally “hiding” his income from the government. Bowman, on the other hand, said he’d never mislead the government about anything – he’d just made it harder for them to get to his money.
And a judge for the U.S. District Court in Oregon, of all places, agreed.
Judge Michael W. Mosman dismissed the felony tax evasion charges against Bowman, ruling that “Not everything that makes collection efforts more difficult qualifies as evasion.”
Of course, Bowman’s battle is far from over. Mosman’s ruling that he isn’t intentionally misleading the government by cashing out his paychecks doesn’t mean Bowman will win his case over why he’s intentionally not paying his taxes.
But he’s got a point. While countless GOP candidates have launched – and won – congressional races on the promise of defunding Planned Parenthood, few have made even an attempt at holding up their end of that bargain. The most recent federal spending bills, passed by a GOP-controlled Congress in both houses and signed by a Republican president, have made exactly zero cuts in Medicaid reimbursements for abortion providers.
Despite the fact that Trump himself promised during the 2016 presidential campaign to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding.
It’s unlikely that Bowman’s solitary tax boycott will result in much change. Heck, his story can barely make the national news, much less instill fear in the heart of a money-hungry Congress.
But his solitary stand does beg a good question: what if Bowman weren’t the only one refusing to pay taxes until abortion providers ceased cashing our paychecks?
What if we all did?