Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- Congress passed and the president signed a long-anticipated transportation related bill. The Senate version of the bill had been amended to give the government the authority to revoke passports from people who had not paid their taxes (once the delinquency reached a certain threshold). The bill that passed does not include this amendment, as it did not survive the reconciliation process. ↬
- You probably heard (a few times too many) that the Obamacare medical and health insurance industry legislation survived a Supreme Court challenge recently. Bitching about Obamacare has become the cause célèbre of a large section of the conservative base this election year, and the usual pundits have been whipping up a froth of anger about it, and particularly about the “individual mandate” that people buy health insurance — a mandate that is enforced through an additional tax on uninsured people. Most interesting, from the Picket Line parochial point of view anyway, is that this tax will just be a line-item on the annual federal income tax statement but the law explicitly prohibits the IRS from using its ordinary tools of liens, levies, seizures, and penalties to enforce payment of this part of the tax. I expect this will cause them some headaches and make them reluctant to pursue any cases at all against low-level tax refusers. A number of people who are part of the anger froth have already declared boldly that they plan to refuse to pay the tax, though American conservatives have a pretty poor record of backing up threats of tax resistance with action. Myself, I hope to remain insured, so I will probably not have the opportunity to resist this tax.
- A new blog called Civil Disobedience — 2012 has been posting some interesting “one-man revolution”-style thoughts, including a post on tax resistance.
- The Occupied Times featured an article on war tax resistance from The Reverend Nemu: Render Unto Caesar.
