The latest tax resistance news:
- Workers in the Codevi (Free Trade Zone) in Ouanaminthe, Haiti have gone on strike to protest a new 10% tax on their wages. It’s a zone where the multinational clothing companies enjoy access to cheap labor (the minimum wage is something like $5.15 per day) and almost entire exemption from corporate taxes and customs charge. Labor apparently doesn’t get to take advantage of a similar boon in economic freedom.
- The U.S. war tax resistance group NWTRCC is coordinating a collective tax redirection project this year, asking those of its members who practice redirection “to collectively redirect taxes to resistance organizations led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.” This represents a more confrontational approach than their previous collective redirection effort, in , in which the group coordinated the redirection of $325,000 from the government to humanitarian projects. The group is asking people who redirect to send them a report about it so they can compile information about the effects of the redirection program.
- The Catalan independence movement continues to lay the groundwork for what it anticipates will be a mass tax strike leading to the political separation of Catalonia from Spain. Already some people and municipalities are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax office instead of to the federal government. Currently, this is a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan tax office forwards these payments to Madrid. But when a critical mass of taxpayers make their payments this way (€7 billion total, they estimate), the separatists plan to cut off the flow.
- The French Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors) has released a report on the écotaxe fiasco. France introduced a new tax on trucking that met a bold and sustained resistance campaign in Brittany which eventually forced the government to abandon the tax. The Auditors determined that the government lost over €1 billion directly from its abandonment of the tax, and gave up an additional €10 billion in anticipated revenue.
- Here’s an example of a mainstream liberal starting to give tax resistance a lazy, non-committal, but curious look-over: Bill Berry: Good reasons for tax resistance are piling up.
- ROAR Magazine looks at The Irish water insurgency. The government of Ireland has long been trying to extract more money from its subjects via increasing rates at the public utility monopolies, rather than through more above-board taxation. And the people of Ireland have long been using a variety of tactics to try to stymie these moves.
