California and New York alone sent the federal government $352 billion more than they received in fiscal 2024. Kentucky took in $2.28 for every dollar it sent in fiscal 2023. Blue states are funding their own oppression. The solution is simple: stop. We don’t live or die on the 2026 midterms. There is so much more we can do no matter what. Let’s start with federal tax resistance. Not individual but institutional. California’s state controller “accidentally” delays federal transfers. New York’s banking system develops “technical difficulties” processing federal revenues. Illinois has “compatibility issues” with IRS systems. Make the federal government sue for every dollar. The leverage here is extraordinary. California alone sent the IRS $766.5 billion in fiscal 2025. New York added another $411.4 billion. These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. This is the federal government’s operating cash. Delay it by a month? The Treasury starts bouncing checks. Delay it by a quarter? Federal agencies shut down. The government can sue, sure. But lawsuits take years. Meanwhile, every delayed payment triggers another crisis, every technical difficulty requires weeks of troubleshooting, every system incompatibility needs months of expert review. Problems cascade into catastrophes while lawyers argue about jurisdiction. Meanwhile, states that are actually interested in running functioning governments are free to do so. The leverage isn’t in transferring money, it’s in the infrastructure. Every federal tax payment runs through banks and 79% of U.S. banks are state-chartered. Blue state banking regulators could require “enhanced security reviews” for all federal transactions. New York’s Department of Financial Services supervises more than 1,300 banks and financial institutions holding more than $3.3 trillion. California’s tech companies run the payment platforms. Illinois hosts the commodity exchanges. Imagine if blue state systems developed simultaneous “compatibility issues” with federal payment processing. Or if state-chartered banks needed to “verify compliance” for every transaction involving federal agencies. The IRS can’t function without state cooperation, they need state tax records for audits, state DMV data for collections, state banking systems for processing. Make that cooperation contingent. Make it slow. Make it repetitive. Make it hurt. The beauty is plausible deniability. It’s not refusal, it’s incompetence. Sorry, our systems are from 1987. Sorry, we’re upgrading our security protocols. Sorry, new compliance measures require manual review of every transaction. So sorry. Republicans weaponized bureaucratic obstruction for decades. They turned administrative delay into an art form. Use their masterpiece against them. Maryland has already enacted part of this. Since July 1, 2026, its comptroller can stop the state’s payments to the federal government when federal agencies defy court orders to pay Maryland money Congress approved. That is the third of the four tiers of state tax resistance we described in September 2026. We can go so much further than finances. substack.com
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