The U.S. Government Puts Special Taxes on Vaccines
This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than
the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce
their support of the government in these areas.
The Excise Tax on Vaccines
Description
There is a federal excise tax on those vaccines to prevent diseases in humans
that are made in or imported into the United States.
Amount of the Tax
Each such vaccine purchased in the United States has a 75¢ federal excise tax
attached to its purchase price. The tax is per-vaccine, not per-dose, so for
instance the measles-mumps-rubella combination vaccine includes a $2.25 excise
tax — 75¢ per disease prevented.
How Much the Government Collects
In the federal government reported receiving
about $241 million from this tax.
How This Tax Is Collected
The manufacturer, producer, or importer of the vaccine is responsible for
paying the tax.
Are the Tax Receipts Earmarked?
This tax is earmarked for the vaccine injury compensation fund. That fund,
as of , had a nearly $3 billion
surplus which it invested in
U.S. Treasury
securities.
How Can You Resist This Tax?
You can resist this tax by not being vaccinated (to clarify: I do not
recommend neglecting essential vaccinations to avoid paying a small
tax), or, perhaps more safely, by being vaccinated while in another
country with a vaccine produced outside of the United States.
Several days back, I quoted this
intriguing passage from Susan Martha Reed’s Church and
State in Massachusetts,
(), p. 90 (emphasis mine):
While the Quakers insisted strongly upon resistance to the payment of taxes
in certain cases, they were, on the whole, law-abiding citizens, the various
meetings using their influence to accomplish this result. The Rhode Island
Quarterly Meeting was in much distressed by
complaint that certain Friends “Eastward” refused to pay any public
taxes to the government on the ground that a great part of the money was used
for war. A paper was drawn up on the subject and travelling Friends
were asked to urge Hampton and Dover people to pay the rates.
There are also many mentions in the same book of Quakers (and certain other
sects) resisting taxes and mandatory tithes designed to support an
establishment church. This seems to have been a particularly hard battle in
Massachusetts. Another source (“Friends in New England”
Friends’ Intelligencer / The
Friends’ Journal Volume 43, page 294) says:
[Quakers] were constantly impoverished by the confiscation of their property
to satisfy the demands of Christian ministers. This contest between an
intolerant and despotic Christian church and these unyielding champions of
religious liberty continued until the year ,
when it ended in a most welcome triumph for the Quakers. In
some Quaker
selectmen of Dartmouth and Tivertod who had been imprisoned for refusing to
collect taxes for the support of clergymen appealed to the English
government. Their case was argued before the king’s privy council, and it was
decreed that the taxes in question must be remitted and the delinquent
officials released. This important event has not yet received the attention
it merits from any historian of whom I have knowledge. It not only marks the
termination of the unmerited and barbarous persecution suffered by the
Quakers for nearly three quarters of a century, but it marks also the
collapse of the effort made by the Puritans to establish a theocracy in
Massachusetts.
The imprisoned tax resisting selectmen in this case were Joseph Anthony, John
Sisson, John Akin, and Philip Tabor. Tabor was a Baptist and the others were
Quakers. (This according to Isaac Backus’s A History of
New-England with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians called
Baptists, 2nd edition,
— originally published in
— page 534, which, however, also reports
that in spite of the legal ruling and a subsequent Massachusetts law to exempt
non-“Pædobaptists” from such mandatory tithes, imprisonments for failure to
pay continued.)
Backus reprints the petition that Thomas Richardson took to the king in London
to plead on behalf of the prisoners. It complains that many Quakers and other
such dissenters came to the colony at great sacrifice precisely because it
was established with an express grant of religious freedom, but that since
then the majority Presbyterians and Congregationalists (“Independents”) have
passed laws forcing them to support an “orthodox” church of that persuasion.
When a law added a new tax on the
citizens of Dartmouth and Tiverton, the tax collectors rebelled:
[S]ome of the said assessors being of the people called Quakers, and others of
them also dissenting from the Presbyterians and Independents and greatest part
of the inhabitants of said towns being also Quakers or Anabaptists or of
differing sentiments in religion from Independents, though the said assessors
duly assessed the other taxes upon the people there, relating to the support
of government, to the best of their knowledge, yet they could not in
conscience assess any of the inhabitants of these towns anything for or
towards the maintenance of any ministers; That they, the said Joseph Anthony,
John Sisson, John Aikin and Philip Tabor, on pretense of their non-compliance
with the said law, were, on ,
committed to the jail aforesaid, where they still continue prisoners, under
great sufferings and hardships, both to themselves and families, and where
they must remain and die, if not relieved by the king’s royal clemency and
favor: That the people called Quakers in the said province, are, and generally
have been, great sufferers by the said laws, in their cattle, horses, sheep,
corn and household goods, which from time to time have been taken from them by
violence of the said laws for the maintenance of ministers who call themselves
able, learned and orthodox…
A committee set up to study the issue reported to the king that “as by the
charter granted to [Massachusetts], a free and absolute liberty of conscience
to all Christians (except papists) was intended to have been their foundation
and support… we cannot see why the Quakers should be refused this liberty, in
the towns where they are so great a majority, and be obliged to maintain a
teacher of a different persuasion. Wherefore we humbly propose to your
Majesty, that this act may be repealed…” The king then repealed the particular
tax and ordered the release of the prisoners, though without going much
further into the root cause of the problem. But this was a year later, and it
wasn’t until that the
Massachusetts Assembly passed an act to set the men free “to signify their
ready and dutiful compliance with his Majesty’s declared will and pleasure.”
