Yet more bits and pieces from here and there:
- At Animal Person, Mary Martin shares a poignant story about an ex-boyfriend who was a tax resister. They broke up because she couldn’t see how her dreams of starting a family could mesh with his principles that put him in what she assumed was dangerous conflict with the state. Martin wonders how to find that workable medium between quiet guilty compliance on one hand, and quixotic martyrdom on the other.
- If you’re a Picket Line regular, you’ve probably read a thing or two about the “underground economy.” But have you heard about the “underground government?” According to Hans Sennholz, just as some people escape into the underground economy so as to have an income off-the-books, the government has been creating vast numbers of off-the-books government functions so as to evade budgetary restrictions and hide the true size of government and depth of government debt. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were examples of these — ostensibly private corporations, they could take on huge debts and liabilities without any nominal impact on the federal budget, at least until the recent judgment day.
- David Little, one of the rare examples of an anti-abortion tax resister, is profiled in the Globe & Mail.
Excerpts:
“A portion of every cent I give them is going to kill babies. I don’t care how infinitesimally small it is,” he said, as the conversation ranged from biblical parables to speaking in tongues, from miracles to modern-day saints.
“When I finally took the decision to embrace courage and fight the federal government, it was because I could no longer look myself in the mirror and ask the question: Who am I to pray for life and pay for death?”
“This is an issue where I appear to be the sole person in the entire country who’s decided that he will never co-operate for the filing of income tax, as long as it is going to be used to kill innocent human beings.”
There would be widespread support among Catholics for his form of civil disobedience, he believes, were not anti-abortion groups and the church afraid of angering the government by advocating it.
- Probably to nobody’s surprise, the rich dodge their taxes more than other folks. This seems to be mostly a matter of opportunity: ordinary folks get most of their income from wages, the taxes on which are harder to escape, while rich folks get a lot of their lucre from capital gains and business income, where it’s easier to get creative.
- Good luck with this one: An aide to the Governor of New York is in trouble for having not filed his taxes for years, to the extent that he’s now in the hole to the tune of about three hundred thousand dollars. His attorney suggests that his client may be suffering from “non-filers syndrome.” I hope its contagious.
