Can you refuse to pay federal taxes that go to support the military for reason of conscientious objection?
No. All you can do is move to a country that has no military service, and then you won’t be paying any military taxes. Of course, there are no such countries, because it is an unfortunate fact of life that if there were such a country its neighbors would quickly annex it. Where there is no military, you have a power vacuum, and vacuums here on earth are always filled eventually. General Suvorov of Imperial Russia said “You will feed an army. Ours or theirs.” But take heart. You aren’t GIVING the military anything. They are coming and TAKING it. Therefore, you aren’t responsible for what they do with your tax money.
Just want to mention here that while you can’t legally refuse to pay taxes – you can go ahead and NOT pay taxes, and there is very little chance you will ever be audited. Plenty of people don’t ever pay taxes. Of course if you ever ARE audited, you will be charged with back taxes and interest penalties. Just FYI. As an aside, I am not advocating doing this, just pointing out facts. But I feel you on not wanting to fund military projects you disagree with – I wish we could designate which areas of government we wanted our money to go toward. I wouldn’t fund one dime of the occupation of Iraq. Ah well.
