I Plug Low-Income Tax Resistance for the Readers of “Shareable”

An article I wrote about my tax resistance strategy and about the various benefits of a lower-income lifestyle now graces the pages of Shareable. It starts:

Nine years ago, I started living a more bountiful life by working less, earning less, and spending less.

I started by going to my employer’s human resources department to ask if I might take a significant pay cut. “How significant?” they asked. I said, “I’m not sure yet; maybe 75 percent?”

And concludes:

Take stock of your own vision of a rewarding, generous life, and look closely at which components of it are best served by earning money and which components are best served in more direct ways. Look also for ways in which your career may interfere with such a life. And look at how the government, by means of the tax system, is forcing you to expend your time and energy on priorities that contradict your values. Consider the possibility that the most bountiful and generous life you could be living may be one in which you are earning and spending less but living and sharing more.

In other news, while activists on the American left seem most interested in getting corporations and rich people to pay more taxes, in Europe more such activists are asking “why are any of us still paying taxes to these crooks when we know we can put the money to better use than they can?”

Last month I mentioned the tax resistance & redirection campaign launched under the ¡Rebelaos! banner and organized by Derecho de Rebelión.

I’m happy to report that the Spanish war tax resistance movement is lending support to this new movement. Arcadi Oliveres spoke at a conference on economic resistance over the weekend “concerning military spending and resistance to militarism by means of tax resistance.”

They’re also working on a tax resisters’ handbook. You can read a draft PDF on-line.

Meanwhile, in a separate tax resistance campaign, some Catalan separatists have started paying their federal taxes into the Catalan treasury instead of submitting the money to the central Spanish government.

A clever fellow has come up with a plan to get money out of politics. Dubbed Repledge, it works like this:

We connect individual contributors who agree to transform their political contributions into charitable donations if a supporter of the opposing political candidate matches the contribution.

This way, people can divert their political contributions to more useful purposes without feeling that they’re thereby empowering even worse politicians than they ones they had been intending to feed.