By Paul Dragu
The New American
January 7, 2026
With only a few days left as a member of Congress, North Georgia's fiery representative is encouraging Americans not to pay their taxes this year.
"Almost every Trump voter I see on X is so fed up they are planning a 2026 tax revolt," Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a social media post on Wednesday. "And rightfully so!"
Greene's recent ire appears to have been triggered by the hottest domestic news item at the time, the Somali day care scam in Minnesota. A 23-year-old YouTuber named Nick Shirley decided to commit a vigilante act of journalism by visiting day care centers run by Somali immigrants. His poking about revealed that many "day care centers" had no children there. One of those centers even managed to advertise its fraudulent business with incorrect spelling.
Shirley's reporting has faced scrutiny, some of it legitimate, but the basis of his allegations is very credible. Somali scams are legitimate. The state of Minnesota has documentation proving that many day care centers have been out of compliance for years. Moreover, the Justice Department was investigating the larger Somali day care scam before Shirley's video went viral.
But Shirley's expose is only a recent reminder to the American people that they're being abused and exploited, and - worst of all - with their own money. While they struggle to buy groceries, afford their healthcare, and heat their homes, burdensome taxes empty out their pockets and go into those of fraudsters and war profiteers. Greene echoed this very sentiment in her message, saying, "Americans work their a**es off, barely make ends meet, and the government consistently gives their hard earned tax dollars to foreign countries, foreign wars, and foreigners the U.S. government has brought/allowed into America!"
Trump Abandoning Supporters
By now, Greene's fallout with President Donald Trump over her disillusionment with how his administration is spending money has been well documented. So has the president's very public break with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whom he had endorsed in the past. But there are signs that the crack of disillusionment is widening. As we recently reported, Gen. Michael Flynn, a one-time national security advisor to the president, recently wrote his former boss a public letter essentially saying it was time to deliver on his campaign promises, before his "legacy in history will be tarnished beyond repair."
Greene also shared on her social media feed a profanity-laced clip of a rant by influencer Andy Frisella, something we suspect captures the level of frustration among many common Americans. "We are being lied to, and not only are we being lied to - we're being exploited at the highest degree," Frisella said. He talked about how hard he works to make a living, only to be "replaced" with his own tax dollars. They (they being the government) are using that money to bring in people that hate us, he points out, and then "they are paying them to be here." If this isn't the breaking point, "then our country" is doomed, Frisella angrily concluded the point.
Frisella said that President Trump needs to realize that people are very angry, and "he needs to understand that he is violating the promises that he has made to the American people." The influencer finished by saying he no longer gives Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Untenable Situation
We're not even a full year into the second Trump tenure and rebellion is brewing on the Right. A silver lining is that this growing anger has the potential to go beyond social media rants. The people are beginning to realize the foolishness in funding their own poverty, their own exploitation, and their own country's demise. And part of the answer, they are beginning to conclude, is to stop providing the government with the revenue that makes their undoing possible.
The standard definition of absurd is something that is ridiculously unreasonable or illogical - something that is way out of the bounds of common sense. It is nothing short of absurd that a country $38 trillion in debt, a nation full of citizens who can barely pay their bills, is the same country that allocates trillions of dollars to welfare programs riddled with fraud, foreign aid to countries that can take care of themselves, and piles of cash to fund a military-industrial complex that went rogue a long time ago and has for more than a century been on an unapproved empire-building mission.
Federal Taxes Lead to Uncontrolled Government
As California businessman and tax rebel Howard Jarvis once pointed out, increased taxation turned America's limited government into an unlimited one. It's no coincidence that the scope and size of government exploded after Congress passed the federal income tax in the early 20th century. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Department of Transportation - as well as the Departments of Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security - were all created after the ratification of the 16th Amendment.
So were the following agencies: the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Social Security Administration, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Tennessee Valley Authority, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And we also got these after the 16th Amendment: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Civil Rights Act programs, Voting Rights Act enforcement, and War on Poverty initiatives.
Big Government Is Not Good for the People
Defenders of Big Government like to drone on about how America's nanny state makes the lives of its citizens richer, more civilized, and safer. These agencies and their programs supposedly protect us from poisonous food, fake medicines, dirty rivers, and a variety of fraudsters. Obviously, that is hardly the case. While they've done some good, a legitimate cost-benefit analysis would unequivocally show that they've done far more harm than good.
Americans are not just poorer than they used to be, but they're sicker. Their food is not just more expensive, but exponentially less nutritious, even toxic in many cases. And their healthcare costs have, like everything else, skyrocketed as well. All of this is the result, in a large part, of an unholy, corrupt alliance between Big Pharma and Big Food. The FDA has recalled thousands of drugs that it approved. That's thousands of drugs that people have taken. That is far worse than being victim to snake-oil salesmen.
A good illustration of the outright abuse and destruction these programs have caused is the government's criminal-like abuse during the Covid era. There would've been no Anthony Fauci, no bogus guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for all to bow down to, and no medical cabal to orchestrate a propaganda and outright restriction campaign against medicine that worked against Covid-19 had it not been for HHS.
These programs, as we've covered, also provide easy ways for fraudsters to steal from the middle class. And they make it easier for the elite class - through their nongovernmental organizations - to siphon off resources from producers.
More Failures
And were it not so tragic, it would be laughable that even the government's attempt to police morality has backfired. Instead of ridding American society of "racism," the federal government codified racial discrimination into policy. For decades, affirmative action incentivized and legalized discrimination against whites and Asians. Joe Biden's administration famously went a step further when it hired race hucksters to browbeat government employees into accepting blatantly racist ideologies regarding white people.
Moreover, the expansion of taxes created an out-of-control behemoth of a government filled with people who serve the special-interest class, lawmakers who barely pay any attention to their constituents.
Before the federal income tax, the government was much smaller. Its impact on the citizens' daily lives was limited. And it's no coincidence that throughout that entire time America was a nation on the rise, unlike its current status of obvious decline.
Skyrocketing Debt and Regulation
America has never been in as much debt as it is today. In fact, there was even a short period of time in the 19th century during which the country was completely debt free. It was a time when the U.S. government had almost no influence over the free market, as economist Thomas Eddlem once noted. By contrast, Eddlem pointed out, the income tax now facilitates a transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive. It manipulates the people's relationship with the market. It coerces them into making choices they wouldn't otherwise make. "These manipulations - whether in favor of 'green energy' research, 'cash for clunker' automobile purchases, or tobacco crop subsidies - have been chosen according to the prevailing virtue in Washington," he further observed.
Before the federal income tax, the government generated revenue through tariffs, also known as import taxes, and supplemented federal income through excises on alcohol, tobacco, and inheritances. And it was more than enough. Part of the reason was because the federal government wasn't so big, just as the Framers had intended it.
Historical Tax Revolts
Historically, Americans have hated taxes with borderline violent passion. Sometimes those passions crossed over that border. Even in the pre-income-tax era, taxes triggered a series of revolts. Eddlem noted:
The Founding Fathers sought to pay off the massive debt from the War of Independence by imposing taxes on imports (tariffs) as well as taxes on the sale of alcohol and tobacco (which are called "excises"). The tax on alcohol prompted farmers in Western Pennsylvania to start a tax revolt, now called the "Whiskey Rebellion," as whiskey had come into use among poor frontier traders as money in lieu of scarce gold and silver coin.
Other tax revolts included Fries Rebellion, also of Western Pennsylvania; South Carolina's protest against the Tariff of 1828; the great tax delinquency of the Great Depression; and California's Proposition 13, led by the previously mentioned Howard Jarvis, which capped property taxes in the once-golden state.
Today, the American people appear to be coming back to their senses. They're starting to realize they've been bamboozled and are directing some of their ire directly at the source. Anti-tax sentiment is bubbling over all over the country.
State and Federal Pushback
In Florida, lawmakers are working on proposals that would eliminate property taxes on primary homes. If this becomes law, Florida would be the first state without an income tax and without property taxes for primary homeowners. In Kentucky, where the income tax rate just dropped from 4 percent to 3.5 percent, lawmakers have made clear the goal is to completely eliminate the state income tax within the coming years. Some Bluegrass State legislators are also riding a wave of support for ending property taxes. In Ohio, state legislators introduced 50 bills related to property taxes in 2025. Grassroots efforts are collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to abolish property taxes. And in Pennsylvania, Representative Russ Diamond introduced House Bill 900, an amendment to abolish property taxes entirely.
Even Congress is toying with the idea. Last January, the House introduced a bill to abolish the federal income tax and the IRS that collects it. According to the bill, the purpose of H.R. 25 is "To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States." And this is an abridged version of all the anti-tax activity happening in America.
An American Tradition
It is an American tradition to hate taxes. One of the major triggers of the War for Independence was the Crown's abuse of the Colonists through taxation. That was the source of the famous cry "No taxation without representation." Modern Americans are not so different. Clearly, the people in charge do not represent the concerns, values, and well-being of the American people. One of the best ways to neuter the parasitic elite class is to reverse the communist-endorsed tax infrastructure - and restore power and wealth to the people who build and maintain the nation.
This article was originally published on The New American.
Paul Dragu is a senior editor at The New American, award-winning reporter, host of The New American Daily, and writer of Defector: A True Story of Tyranny, Liberty and Purpose.