Tax Day is Coming and American War Tax Resisters Are Ready

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• NWTRCC is maintaining a list of war tax resistance actions coming up around Tax Day (April 18^th) this year across the United States. Check back from time to time to see what’s going on in your neck of the woods, or let them know if you’re planning something good.
• The War Resisters League has revised their popular “pie chart” graph that purports to show the destiny of the federal discretionary budget and thereby the destiny of your federal income tax dollar. This year, because Obama’s budget called for a reduction in the payroll tax rate with the missing money to come explicitly out of that raised by the income tax in the general fund, the chart’s conceit of keeping trust funds and the taxes ostensibly destined for them separate from the rest of the accounts is even more awkward than usual. Still, the fliers make for good conversation-starters.
• The number of people who expatriated from the United States and renounced their U.S. citizenship jumped last year, more than doubling the number in the previous year.
• Want to know the various methods people use to evade and resist the various taxes on tobacco? Your government has published a helpful report on the subject.

From the 13 March 1949 New York Times:

Woman Cuts Her Tax To Avoid Paying for Arms

By The Associated Press.

Yellow Springs, Ohio, March 12 — Mrs. Caroline Urie, a 75-year-old Quaker widow, who does not want to help finance military preparedness, reduced the first installment of her income tax accordingly today.

Mrs. Urie, who made the news last year with a similar protest, deducted 32.3 per cent of the first installment because, she said, “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime against humanity.”

She failed last year in her publicized protest. She deducted 34.6 per cent of her estimated tax for the year but Congress reduced taxes in her income bracket. Her income fell enough below her estimate so that at the year’s end the Government owed her money.

She said today she had made sure this would not happen this year. She said she would withhold the full amount of “military taxes” by paying only the first installment of the tax now and giving herself until Jan. 15, 1950, to pay the final quarter.

Mrs. Urie said she had given the 32.3 per cent, her own estimate, to “three nonprofit agencies working for peace and the abolition of war.”