Some international tax resistance news that has flashed over my screen in recent days:
Catalonia
- A report in Negocios.com suggests that the campaign to get Catalan municipalities to send their taxes to the Catalan government rather than to Spain has flopped. According to the report, only 70 to 80 of the 941 municipalities signed on to the largely-symbolic tax resistance plan, even though in 248 of them, Catalan separatists have a governing majority.
- On the other hand, this report says that Catalonia is well on its way to creating an independent tax agency and that mass tax resistance is only a matter of time.
The U.K.
- Low-income workers in Britain are becoming subject to council taxes from which they were previously exempt. The councils are expecting mass tax refusal and some are comparing it to Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Tax collection in the North Kivu region ground to a halt in a protest against degraded security in the region.
Spain
- The High Court of Valencia recently declared that Spanish citizens do not have the right to withhold tax payments for reasons of conscientious objection to military spending.
Greece
- 4,000 people in Crete have each paid only €1 of their road taxes in a protest there. The action was organized by «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Paying”), which last year held a similar protest that only attracted some dozens of participants. The group is protesting against rising taxes at a time of increasing economic difficulties, and that the taxes are not actually going to crucially needed road improvements. That group is also organizing protests at government auctions of seized property.
global
- A record number of U.S. citizens renounced their citizenship last quarter and we’re set for another record year of this.
