Reach Out to Potential Resisters at the Time and Place of Payment

One way to spread the tax resistance message, and to reach potential resisters when they may be most receptive to that message, is to propagandize them when and where they typically make their tax payments.

Example American War Tax Resisters

This tactic was particularly prominent in the American war tax resistance movement, which often conducted demonstrations and other outreach activities at post offices and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) buildings on “tax day,” the day when annual income tax filings are due. (In the modern e-filing era when fewer people file paper returns through the mail in last-minute trips to the post office, this practice has begun to fade.)

War tax resister Frida Berrigan explained the tactic this way:

On tax day, everybody’s scrambling to pay the government and feeling like their hard earned dollars are being sopped up and wishing that that money went to roads and to schools and to healthcare. We were able to interject some information about where that money really goes—and to offer some alternatives… about how people can withdraw their own complicity.

Here are some of the many examples of how war tax resisters used tax day as a creative outreach opportunity:

On tax day in 1966 Ken Knudson highlighted the connection between conscription and taxation by burning a check made out to the IRS while standing in front of the IRS office in Madison, Wisconsin, in much the same way as protesting conscripts were burning their draft registration cards.
Around tax day in 1982, war tax resister Ralph Dull filled his truck with 325 bushels of corn and delivered these to the IRS office in lieu of his tax payment. He said that his unusual form of payment symbolized “the need for the United States government to balance the budget by not cutting human services but by reducing military spending by at least $100 billion.”
War tax resisters in St. Louis, Missouri, propagandized taxpayers on tax day in 2003 by printing up their own tax forms. These featured a ghostly photo of an Iraqi child who had been wounded in the U.S. war on Iraq superimposed over the usual grid of an income tax form. They placed these forms alongside the ones that taxpayers would pick up to fill out their returns.
The following year, I joined a group of war tax resisters in Oakland, California, and helped to enact a skit about taxes and war. I played the part of an IRS agent and chided the crowd of protesters:

“You seem like politically-savvy people. But do you realize that you wouldn’t have anything to protest here today if it weren’t for the things the government funds with your money? Your taxes make protests like this possible! You should thank us!… cluster bombs don’t grow on trees, barbed wire doesn’t grow on trees! It takes your money to make all this possible. We can’t do it without you! We can’t do it without you!”
In Portland, Oregon, war tax resisters held up a series of signs along the roadside that, in the fashion of the old “Burma Shave” billboards, spelled out rhyming messages:

$Six billion a month
and death every day
Don’t like the war?
Then refuse to pay

Instead of bombs
let’s use the tax
to feed more kids
ours & Iraq’s
In 2007, “The Occupation Project” in St. Louis, Missouri, displayed a series of “Caution” signs along the roadside. The first read “Caution: War Tax Payment Zone.” This was followed by one reading “Pause before you pay for…” and then a series of signs with messages like “House to House Searches,” “Torture,” “Hundreds of Thousands of Refugees,” “Over 3200 U.S. Military Dead,” and “Over 600,000 Iraqi Dead.”
War tax resisters in Biscay held a chorizada (barbecue) in front of the executive government building during tax filing season in 2011. They protested the “chorizada” (“swindle”) of military spending by passing out pieces of chorizo (sausage) to passers-by while promoting war tax resistance and redirection.

Notes and Citations

“Anti-war Tax Day Action” Next Left Notes 17 April 2008
“Tax Check Is Burned By a War Protester” New York Times 16 April 1966
“Farmer tries to pay his taxes with grain” The Bryan Times 16 April 1982, p. 3
“Corn Refused for Taxes” St. Joseph [Missouri] News-Press 11 April 1982, p. 8C
“Tax Day signs on Burnside Bridge” Portland Independent Media Center 16 April 2005
“No Blank Check for Killing: Tax Day Actions, Tuesday, April 17, 2007” (NWTRCC website)
“Barbacoa contra la ‘chorizada’ del gasto militar” Kaos en la Red 8 June 2011