Cindy Sheehan Makes the Case for Tax Resistance

Cindy Sheehan has made her book Myth America Ⅱ: The Twenty Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution freely available on-line. Here is her take on tax resistance:

Now tax evasion and tax resistance are two different things.

Tax resisters, like myself, take a moral position that we do not want our money to be used for the purposes of such things as, war, torture, environmental degradation and other immoral shit that we would not pay directly for, so why should we pay indirectly?

If Obama came up to you and asked you to write a check for $5,000 to pay for war and torture, would you give it to him? Or would you rightly refuse?

Some tax resisters go the tax evasion route to legally avoid taxes by limiting income to under the legal plateau that would require one to file. Others, like myself, simply do not file no matter how much, or little, we make.

If you feel that it’s your duty to support this country in its crimes, then I suggest you learn how to game the system and as thoroughly and successfully as these Robber Class entities that take plenty away, but give nothing back.

However, I do not pay my income taxes because I do not, even in a small way, want to help finance what the government is doing.

I have read that over 50% of our federal tax dollars go towards paying for wars and paying off prior wars. After my son was killed in Iraq, I felt ashamed that I had been funding this cancerous system for years. It’s a system that grows like a cancer and takes the lives of unsuspecting members of the Robbed Class who do not take the time to educate themselves about the disease.

The approximate Pentagon Budget for 2009 is $635 billion for the Pentagon and $168 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is over $800 billion dollars where the department of education gets $46.7 billion! Our priorities are definitely skewed in the nation! 800 billion dollars could send every high school senior to a four-year university! Imagine if we had a system where education was equalized for everyone, not just for the children of the Robber Class? No one would join its army — hmmm.

Imagine what else your taxes go for — you subsidize the government to torture other people. You give the government a portion of your hard earned money to spy on its own citizens. You help incarcerate people in morally bankrupt “three strikes” laws and help fight the failed war on drugs. And you guessed it, the Robber Class also benefits from the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs.

We do not pay our taxes to cover every American with universal, single-payer health care or universal university education. We also do not pay our taxes to have every American housed. I would pay my taxes for these things.

With the Federal Reserve System in place, federal income taxes are only a Robber Class illusion anyway — One that keeps “We the Robbed” in a constant state of political flux. If everyone who disagreed with U.S. foreign (and/or domestic) policy stopped filing and paying their federal income taxes, that would send quite a message!

We could, and we usually do, sit around and bitch and moan about taxes. As I pointed out in the chapter, we are literally taxed to death. But what do we do?

I am a proud income tax conscientious objector. I refuse to pay my taxes to the Robber Class to finance its crimes. An investigation and report during the Reagan administration called the Grace Commission found that 100% of our tax money goes towards paying debt. Here again the Federal Reserve rears its butt-ugly and evil head.

Consider withholding all, or even part, of your taxes as a protest.

Learn how and the risks at: War Resister’s League.

Let’s be real — there could be some pretty stiff consequences for paying for war, but like I said in the chapter, I was ashamed when I realized that my obeisance to this Robber Class system had not only contributed to the deaths of millions of people, but to the death of my own dear son.

To me, the consequences of paying my taxes were far greater than any penalty the Robbers may throw at me — how much money is a son’s life worth?