Some links from here and there:
- The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues. In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
- If the Democrats running for President can agree on one thing, it’s more money and power for the IRS. The just-released Trump administration budget proposal aims for small budget increases for the agency as well.
- A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week. The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government. In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province. They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
- Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
- There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. It seems to mostly recycle recent blog posts, but also includes reports that the IRS may be over-zealously (and extra-legally) applying “frivolous filing” penalties again, news on how to use the revamped W-4 form to adjust your tax withholding so you can resist payment, and a brief note on the NWTRCC national gathering coming up in in Chicago.
