25 September 2003

Fred X wrote to me today:

The impulse for my writing this email is your resistance to supporting the military through income tax. I’m doing the exact same thing. I paid no income tax last year. Legally. And I plan to do the same this year. And probably for some time to come. I too live on a minimal amount of money, avoid paying tax, and have become very dedicated to this concept through recent developments in international relations.

So I wrote back with some questions, starting with: “Did you find lowering your income below the tax threshold was harder or easier than you expected?”

Easier. I didn’t realize just how high that threshold really is, and was pleasantly surprised when I did my taxes for last year and discovered that I was able to pay a total of zero income tax, both fed & state, for the whole year. It wasn’t something I did intentionally at first, but as events unfolded leading to war, it has become a stated goal of mine.

“Did you have to lower your income more or less than you’d anticipated?”

I didn’t have to lower my income. I’ve lived frugally for years, and it wasn’t much of an adjustment to simply stop the paychecks. My expenses haven’t changed much from when I made corporate wages to now. In fact, my monthly budget has remained the same for over 6 years now. Some things increase in price, and others decrease. I’m comfortable.

“Do you think of the decision to do this as more of a personal washing-blood-from-the-hands sort of thing, or more as a protest, or more of a practical strategy to defund the government (or something else entirely)?”

I think of this both as removing myself from any form of responsibility for what the current US administration is doing, as well as a type of protest. I don’t have a practical view of this way of life having any significant effect on the federal government, because the vast majority of Americans will never be steered away from their highly-consumptive lifestyles. But from a personal morality perspective, I gain a sense of “centeredness” in knowing that this is another way in which my lifestyle and my values work together in harmony. There are plenty of ways in which I’m a total hypocrite, but this isn’t one of them.

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One gambit that tax protesters have used in the past has been to insist that the fifth amendment to the constitution prohibits the government from compelling people to reveal details about their financial lives, and that therefore they should not be compelled to file tax returns. The IRS has pretty well shot this one down, but…

In today’s news is an item that might reopen this issue. The Boston Globe reports that “[t]he Internal Revenue Service is exploring ways to share names, addresses, birth dates, employee records, and other taxpayer information with law-enforcement agencies, particularly the Immigration and Naturalization Service, according to legislative aides and senior tax attorneys.… Currently, the IRS must obtain a court order before it can share information with another governmental agency.”