Edmund Wilson and the Income Tax

 Edmund Wilson's The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963) is an eloquent plea for tax resistance as a form of protest. Few today could disagree with Wilson's critique of the budding national security state as it existed at the time he was writing. Indeed, the tract often reads as astonishingly prescient. Here, in 1963, Wilson was already warning about U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia. 

He wrote of U.S. troops herding Vietnamese villagers into makeshift concentration camps and torching their crops. He wrote about napalm charring the flesh of innocent civilians—focusing mostly on events in the Korean War; but with an ominous note from Wilson that he had heard "rumors" the weapon was already being deployed in Vietnam (and how right he turned out to be). 

Wilson makes all of these and more pressing moral arguments against U.S. militarism and the dangers of nuclear proliferation, I say—and yet, he also admirably refrains from casting his own tax dodging as a conscientious choice. Instead, he depicts his early troubles with the IRS as a result of a mere failure of adulting. For several years in the '50s, he says—he simply didn't bother to file a return. 

The "Goodreads" page for the book—to the extent anyone is there at all—is mostly filled with people mocking Wilson for negligently failing to file his returns and then trying to turn this cluelessness on his part into some sort of moral stance. Others are even more skeptical of his motives: they suggest that perhaps he was an intentional tax evader, who was never so naïve as he claimed. 

But for someone like me, it's all-too-easy to believe Wilson's story went exactly as he describes it. The opening part of Wilson's book is really just a tale of the perpetual haplessness of the literary intellectual in the face of practical reality. The tax regime—which was then, Wilson convinces us, a relatively new feature of American life—defeated him simply because he couldn't understand it. 

Wilson—like most writers and artists—spent much of his life making so little money that he could not possibly be worth taxing. When, in the 1950s, he finally started to earn a decent—if irregular—income from book sales, he suddenly discovered that the government took an interest in him. Worst of all, he was suddenly expected to conform to a tax regime that made no sense for a writer. 

Wilson objects in particular to the notion of "estimated quarterly payments." And indeed, these have been the bane of my writing life as well. Back when I worked full time on a salary for an organization, of course—my taxes were mostly withheld. But now that I serve the same group as an independent contractor—picking up occasional writing work—I have to learn a whole new set of rules. 

Specifically, I now have to submit quarterly payments to the IRS based on my best guess as to what I will be earning. As Wilson points out with particular fire—this is practically impossible for any self-employed writer. Our income is the definition of catch-as-catch-can. The notion that we could accurately predict it twelve months in advance is risible; but we are punished—he notes—if we get it wrong. 

To the artist or literary intellectual, our survival from day to day is a matter shrouded in the deepest mystery—obscured most of all to ourselves. There may be people who exist in this world with confidence in their ability to earn an income—but we are not them. The arrival of future dollars in our bank account operates by a kind of irregular miracle. Asking us to predict it is a special kind of torture. 

I believe fully—then—that Wilson really was as clueless as he makes himself out to be. And if it's true that his moral qualms about federal taxes were a retroactive justification for a state of delinquency that he wandered into by accident—rather than the result of any deep conviction—he freely admits as much: "My original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence," he writes.

One of the most delightful parts of the book, indeed, is Wilson's willingness to make himself the butt of the joke—the hapless protagonist of a Kafkaesque tragicomedy. He is a three-time divorcé with an irregular income—but also three properties, a small trust fund, and a part-time lectureship at Harvard. He knows his suffering is real—but also that it contains an element of the ridiculous. (At one point, he is forced to negotiate with the IRS over whether he may be allowed to purchase a sleeping-rug for his dog.)

Wilson tells us enough of his financial troubles to cast himself in a humiliating light—but he also discloses enough of his privileges to ensure that we do not pity him too much. In other words—he describes a real financial life, without excessive self-pity or puffery. And where else (unless it be Paul Auster's great memoir Hand to Mouth) have we had such a candid glimpse into a writer's bank account? 

Perhaps people who are not hopelessly impractical will never be able to believe that Wilson really did wander into criminal liability for tax evasion simply by being oblivious. But people like me can only read his story and think—"there but for the grace of God..." The artist will simply never understand how taxes are supposed to work, because they don't understand how money is supposed to work. 

I'm reminded of the scene in William Gaddis's J R, when the hapless and eternally penurious composer Edward Bast is beset by the precocious financial whiz of the book's title. The 11-year-old finance prodigy J.R. tries to explain to Bast all the clever tax stratagems he could use to make business expenses deductible from his income. But—Bast protests in response—"deductible from what?"

Wilson, I'm sure, was simply so amazed to have money for the first time in his life—to be paid for writing (and it's a daily miracle for me as well, which I fully expect to be cut off at any moment)—that it took years before the thought even entered his brain that he might owe some of it to the government. Like Bast, before he could think of taxes, he first had to realize he even had an income. 

Of course, there is some irony in the fact of a left-wing author with vague Marxist sympathies dating from the 1930s (like so many) complaining about having to pay taxes. Did he not—in his youth—vote for the expropriation of the expropriators? Wilson concedes the irony—and says in his defense he thought that socialism—when it came—would somehow pry all that money from the clutches of the rich without resorting to coercion. 

The kind of socialism Wilson believed in, he writes, "would somehow free everyone from bondage and give everyone enough to eat," and would do so only by means of "brotherhood" and "democracy." 

Remember what I said about literary intellectuals and practical realities? 

I can't help but think of today's progressives who declare themselves prison abolitionists, while also calling for higher taxes on the rich and heftier spending on social welfare programs. I think they are pushing in the right direction on both sets of issues—but many, it would seem, fail to see the tension between them. How are rich tax dodgers to be punished for evasion if not with prisons? 

Wilson writes that, as a young socialist voter, he vaguely believed that the right people in office would be able to cure poverty and inequality while simultaneously abolishing bureaucracy and government coercion. Did not Debs himself declare that "so long as there is a soul in prison I am not free"? As of 1963, Wilson is now ready to concede that this youthful attitude on his part had been, perhaps, "naïve." 

I think, at this point in my life, I'm prepared to accept that the misery of taxes is inseparable from many of the good things we want government to do—including providing generous benefits to people who need them. I'm all for higher taxes if they actually go to such worthy ends. And I don't think Wilson would disagree—he is just making the point that, as of 1963, they were mostly not going to such things—

They were going to nuclear stockpiles and napalm instead. 

How about as of 2025? Are our tax dollars being more wisely and humanely spent now? 

Since my last estimated quarterly payment, the U.S. Congress has approved a budget bill to expand funding for ICE detention and deportation and cut taxes for the rich—though the poor will have to pay more (through Trump's new consumption tax in the form of tariffs)—while slashing safety net programs. They also just approved a rescission to claw back funds for foreign aid. 

The administration's cuts to humanitarian aid and welfare benefits could conceivably be justified if they somehow shrank the overall budget—but they do not. Much to the contrary, the budget package will actually put the country trillions of dollars further into the hole. The money that would have gone to food stamps is merely being transferred to tax benefits for the rich and the mass deportation and incarceration of immigrants. 

Wilson does not say the government should do nothing, or that no taxes should be paid. He merely objects that "what we make goes mostly not for life and enlightenment on this planet on which we have not yet found out how to get along decently with one another but for the propagation of darkness and death, for ourselves as well as for the enemy." 

That was 1963—but what are we getting for "what we make" today other than more "darkness and death"?  I might always resent having to make my quarterly payments on an uncertain income—merely because it is inconvenient for me, and my brain recoils from thinking about practical realities as much as Wilson's does. But I wouldn't begrudge it so much if I liked what the government was doing with it. 

Wilson had no desire to pay for humanity's future nuclear annihilation out of the proceeds of his book sales—and I, likewise, have no desire to pay for interest payments on national debts racked up in order to incarcerate noncitizens in hellish conditions and deport them without due process to far-flung nations like South Sudan that have no capacity to provide them a decent life or ensure their protection from persecution. 

When the government tells me that we can't afford to pay for food or medicine for the poor, but we can afford to pay for an internment camp in Cuba or involuntary expulsions of Southeast Asian refugees to Eswatini—plus more tax cuts for the rich—I feel at that point truly entitled to question whether they really do have a moral (as opposed to legal, which I do not dispute) entitlement to my meagre earnings. 

In his Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle ponders at one point why it is that the government can find "a Hundred and Twenty Millions Sterling to shoot the French," yet must "stop short for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the English living?" Carlyle was hardly a liberal in any straightforward sense—but these words have become the eternal cry of the liberal at budget season ever since. 

Why is it that the government can always find more money for killing, but so little for keeping alive? Why can we afford billions of dollars for deporting people to death and persecution—but not to keep 11 million Americans on health insurance? Why is it that we can afford so much for "camps and courts," as Longfellow protested in the 19th century; and so little for the enlightenment of the human mind? 

Such is our annual liberal protest—as the military and deportation budgets keep swelling, and the debt keeps growing, yet the government seems to find less and less cash left over to keep body and soul for the poor and indigent together. 

This is the heart of Wilson's protest as well—and it is as timely under our present administration—with its Big Bloated Budget—as it was in 1963: Why is it that the government always seems to find money for more "darkness and death"—but never for more "life and enlightenment"?