Steve Magin: “You Can Have My Taxes If None Will Be Spent to Kill”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Every year, on tax day, Steve Magin comes into town and visits the IRS offices, offering to pay his taxes in full if they’ll assure him that none of the money will go to pay for war and armaments. The agency representatives, of course, offer no such assurances, and so Magin keeps his checkbook in his pocket and sends the tax money to charity instead. Here’s some more about Steve and his protest.
  • Another “suspicious powder” incident shuts down the IRS office in Ogden, Utah. The powder turned out to be nontoxic, but kept the building shut down for a long time during the Hazmat team and FBI crime scene investigation.
  • I’m sure nobody saw this coming: as states have been piling cigarette taxes higher and higher, tobacco smuggling has skyrocketed — to the point where about half of the smokers in Arizona and New York are smoking cigarettes smuggled in from elsewhere. The smuggling trade has naturally proven a boon to the underground economy and to the organized crime groups who try to monopolize it.

Here’s another article from the liquor tax showdown in Cincinnati in . As I wrote , the constitutionality of the tax in question hinged on the party membership of the judges deciding on the question. As the resisters in the New York Times article quoted below hoped, a new Democratic Supreme Court majority threw out the tax.

Trying to Nullify the Scott Law.

Cincinnati, . — The Saloon-keepers’ Association, at a special meeting, passed a resolution pledging the members to refuse to pay for the coming year the liquor tax assessed under the Scott law. They also made provision for fighting the law. They have been encouraged to take this stand by the trifling of the Democratic Legislature with the law and the fact that the Supreme Court has become Democratic. A second case to test the constitutionality of the law has been brought before the Supreme Court, and the liquor men generally expect to see the law, which has been only once found constitutional by the same tribunal before it became Democratic, declared upon second consideration to be unconstitutional. If this occurs Cincinnati will be deprived of about $400,000 revenue from the liquor sellers annually and their business will again be unrestricted.