April 15th — the usual federal income tax return filing deadline in the U.S. — was in the more whimper than bang category this year. The powers that be decided to extend the filing deadline to , and for that and other reasons, taxes are less on people’s minds than usual this time of year.
But here are some items that have recently come to my attention:
- The U.S. government is sending out “stimulus” payments willy-nilly. Thousands of dollars in forgivable “loans” are being made available to businesses (though it’s something of a crapshoot which businesses will and won’t get them), and most Americans are also getting some free money as well. The individual stimulus checks are already starting to go out. Americans who got tax refunds direct-deposited in their bank accounts last time they filed their taxes were the first to see money. The rest of us have to wait a bit. There was some worry that people who are so poor that they don’t have to file tax returns would be overlooked, but the IRS has created a method for non-filers to apply for the stimulus money too.
- War tax resistance season has arrived in Spain. Here’s some material from Catalonia, where the theme is: “you can’t kill a virus with armaments” as they encourage people to redirect their war taxes to healthcare expenses.
- In the U.S., tax day was subdued for war tax resisters, with a press release and some on-line actions.
- The Bold Italic published a piece by Mary Finn on the People Who Refuse to Pay Their Taxes (war tax resisters, mostly from the San Francisco Bay area)
- I completed assembling an eBook version of The Discourses of Epictetus, and this is now freely available on the Standard Ebooks site.
- There’s a new documentary about paleocon-to-anarchist tax resister Karl Hess.
- The human war on traffic ticket robots took more casualties in Austria recently.
- Businesses in Mexico are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government into granting tax relief or other financial aid during the pandemic crisis, and some state governors there are also making noise about withholding taxes from the federation.
- The Daily Echo dug into the archives and pulled out some photos of the Poll Tax protests of 1990.
