Is paying taxes immoral? Is paying taxes a sin?

I will summarize and expand on these two questions in stack exchange:
one in philosophy
one in Christianity

The question is whether it is immoral and a sin to pay taxes because part of your taxes goes towards war. It assumes your government is and has been involved in unjust and immoral wars that are a sin to take part in, according to your personal religion or moral beliefs. For example according to the Christian Just War Theory, Christian Pacisfism, other religious pacifism, or other moral reasons(no just cause for a war).

An important concept to understand is the fungibility of money. Money used for an expense saves the spender from using that money on another expense, therefore all money is interchangeable under the same owner and a person or government cannot say he or it is using other money for funding war and your money for good causes.

According to a quick google search, turbotax claims about 18% of the federal budget is used on "defense" spending . I do not think this is accurate due to articles like this, this, and this.

I will write another article on whether or not the wars the US is involved in are moral but assume that the wars your government is involved in aren't for this article.

Another way to visualize this is lets say a person goes up to you and says to give them 100 dollars. They will use 20 dollars to buy a gun and bullets to murder someone innocent and 80 dollars to buy medicine and food for needy people. Is it immoral and a sin to give them that money? I am representing war with murdering someone innocent and buying medicine and food with welfare and health services funded by the government. What if the person then tells you they will lock you up in their basement for a year if you do not give them that 100 dollars? Then does it become moral and not a sin, due to a desire to avoid harm? I am using the threat of kidnapping to equal the threat of imprisonment if you do not pay your taxes.

If an argument is that an action is moral and not a sin because you will be punished then at what level of punishment does it become moral? If it is immoral and a sin to commit an action if the punishment is just a slap of the wrist, can it transform to a moral and non-sinful action if the government converts the punishment to be a year in jail or a greater punishment? It seems to me that an action's potential subsequent punishment does not effect whether it is moral or sinful. However, if suicide is a sin in a religion and an action's punishment is death that may be an issue (see Christian martyrdom for example). If we are talking about the United States and I assume any modern society, then the punishment for not paying taxes is not death. Also, there have been people who have sacrificed themselves and their lives for causes they believe in throughout history, so we can't say there is no choice. For example, the 1981 Irish hunger strike where 10 people starved themselves to death.

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The top response to the religious question is as follows:

Some Protestant groups, like those represented by the conservative R.C. Sproul Jr and the Acton Institute, believe that even if the government does nothing but evil, one nonetheless is obligated to pay taxes to support it, because what the government does is not the responsibility of the people supporting it but the fault of the government itself. This is similar to but distinct from the material v.s. formal assistance issue discussed below.

Some Catholic groups, like those represented by the extremist Catholic Worker movement, support the refusal to pay taxes in many cases, in accordance with the rule of conscience. This is not technically different than mainstream Catholicism except that these extremist groups cultivate a spiritual culture that encourages members to question the fundamental aspects of their way of life and supports them even when mainstream society would (or does) condemn them, which makes the likelihood that members make choices like the decision to protest a government by refusing to pay taxes much more likely (since, whether or not they ought to morally, people will rarely take up stances that they know will ostracize them from their support network).

More official stances of the Roman Catholic Church tend to reference the differences between material and formal assistance and generally support refusal to pay taxes only as a method of opposing the whole of the government. Paying taxes to an immoral government is argued to be licit from several directions, including the mitigation of moral culpability do to duress (a weak argument), the distinction between material and formal support and vested interest in the public good (a strong argument when it applies), and the principle of double effect. In sum, Catholicism tends to support tax paying in general for most people living in most countries, but supports not paying taxes as a form of resistance in certain unusual circumstances. Basically "It depends". Again, the rule of conscience is the most typical method of actually determining answers within the Church, in combination with the Church's pastoral care and teaching authority.

Christian Pacifists, who oppose war unilaterally, often engage in war tax resistance. Many of them do so in legal ways, simply by reducing the amount of money they have below the taxable threshold (most Christian Pacifists live in countries where this is a thing). Such protestant denominations clearly believe that, at least in some cases, taxes ought to be denied to a government.

For most groups, this is a question of balancing the need to comply with righteous authority and serve the common good with the need to oppose evil and injustice in the world, it's just answered in different ways.

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The responses to the question posted in philosophy:

1-
As a practical matter, its not moral to refuse to pay taxes because of a single action of the government. In a democracy, you never get your way entirely and every individual can make a creditable moral case that something the government does constitutes an intolerable use of its violence based powers. If everyone felt justified in not paying taxes because they did not like everything the government was doing, everyone could end up morally refusing to pay all taxes.

It follows that if you've reached the point you will no longer financially or otherwise support the government, then morally you shouldn't seek to benefit from it either. Since someone had to be threatened and hurt, if only financially, for you to receive that benefit, if you don't contribute your share, you have no right to ask the government to force others to pay taxes and then give the proceeds directly to you or benefit from some service they pay for e.g. the police or military.

Therefore the moral action is to tolerate government failure and continue to pay taxes until the government's actions in sum become morally intolerable.

For any government to function, a sharp line delineating between individual citizens being are all-in versus all-out. You participate in the political process and fully pay your dictated share of the taxes until you reach that sharp delineation. Then you either, 1) emigrate to another polity or 2) rebel against the total authority of the state and seek to replace it with another that will make better decisions.

2-

Upon learning/understanding injustice is done at your expense by your proxy, yes. I believe the Cynics would be delighted with this inquiry.

3-
If a drug addict has a gun pointed at your head, demanding money, is it necessarily wrong to accede? Taxation is no different. The moral blame for the wrongdoer's actions belong on the wrongdoer, not on their victims, of which you are one.

4-
What if they were demanding something that they couldn't just take from you after they shoot you such as knowledge? And that knowledge would cause harm to many others if the drug addict had it? Agreed, the drug addict is in the wrong. What about the person who divulges the information with the result that it saves him/her self but harms many more?

5-
Just to point it out, there is a workable option in the U.S. Traditional Shakers, some serious Quakers and Mennonites, and most members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light arrange to have taxable income below the zero-tax cutoff by 1) living on barter to one degree or another, 2) allowing the Church or Tribe to hold expensive goods for common use, 3) giving a lot of money to their organizations as charities, and/or 4) (particularly in the case of the Shakers) by carefully keeping everyone's land fully mortgaged with any true equity re-borrowed and invested in Missions.

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See a video of Ron Paul talk about Christian Just War Theory and also here.

See a video of Quaker war tax protester.
And another video about Quaker tax protesting.

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