Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- The Daily Hampshire Gazette has published a nice retrospective of the life and work of Juanita Nelson up to now, which includes the good news that Nelson is working on a memoir.
- If the IRS levies your salary for back taxes, they are supposed to leave you enough to live on and not just take the whole paycheck. They’ve recently published the table they use to calculate how much to take, which is based on how frequently you get paid, your filing status, and the number of exemptions claimed on your W-4.
- Here’s an update on the cases of Spanish war tax resisters Jorge Güemes and Hugo Alcalde, who are pursuing court actions in support of their stand:
[Güemes’s] appeal argues that the resister’s action is the expression of fundamental rights such as the freedom of belief, which doesn’t only cover forms of thinking based on deep convictions, but also the acts consistent with them, and sets limits on the power of the State.
Conscientious objection to the maintaining of armies by means of direct taxes would therefore be an expression of this freedom of belief. The Constitution and international laws protect this right, whether or not there is legislation that covers it. Furthermore, and more importantly, asserts the appeal, civil disobedience such as pacifist tax resistance, is also a guarantor of the collective political right to a just international order and peaceful international relations.
The same appeal makes explicit also that the resister is not merely seeking relief against an unjust administrative decision, but rather to follow an ethical imperative to help spread tax resistance, using his case as an amplifier for these ideas.
- British war tax resister Roy Prockter tells how the tax collector confronted him:
[H]e asked me my reasons for refusing, when I said conscientious objection to military taxation he started getting agitated, asking if I objected to paying for schools and hospitals as well — I said that I’d be pleased to pay for schools and hospitals if I could do so without paying for the military to kill people.
He then said that he’d met some nutters in his line of work, but I took the biscuit!