The December NWTRCC newsletter is on-line, and has a lot of information about October’s strategy conference, among other things.

NWTRCC has also rereleased their “Peace Tax Return” that protesters can send in along with their tax returns next year if they want to let the IRS know why they’re upset.

Back in October I linked to Robert McGee’s paper on The Ethics of Tax Evasion. McGee has a new paper out that covers much of the same material — Three Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion:

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled “The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes”. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, much of which took place in Latin. Since Crowe’s dissertation, not much has been written on the topic of tax evasion from an ethical perspective, with a few exceptions. In 1998 and 1999, a few articles were published on the ethics of tax evasion in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. An edited book on this topic was published in 1998.

The present paper summarizes, updates and expands on Crowe’s work and the other more recent work that has been published on this topic. Three basic views on the ethics of tax evasion have emerged over the centuries. This article presents and critiques those three views and raises some questions about points that have not yet been explored in the literature.

Other papers of McGee’s available on-line include:

• Why People Evade Taxes in Armenia: A Look at an Ethical Issue Based on a Summary of Interviews
• Is It Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State? A Look at Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Mormon and Baha’i Perspectives
• Jewish Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion
• Christian Views on the Ethics of Tax Evasion
• The Ethics of Tax Evasion and Trade Protectionism from an Islamic Perspective
• Is Tax Evasion Unethical?

There are some new tax credits coming next year — one set of credits for various types of more fuel-efficient motor vehicles, and another set for energy-saving home improvements (from reflective roofs to insulation to more efficient water heaters and furnaces to solar cells and solar water heaters).

If you think you’ll have a hard time getting under the tax line next year, you may want to look into this. $15,000 extra taxable income can suddenly become untaxable if you get a $2,000 tax credit for buying $6,750 worth of home solar power — and then your electricity bill will go down too!