“Peace Tax Fund” Schemes — A Closer Look

In ’s Picket Line I had some discouraging things to say about ideas like the “Peace Tax Fund.” In fact, I dismissed them as worthless and wondered why they were so popular in war tax resistance circles.

I decided that I’d better take a closer look and make sure I really understood what I was talking about.

The “Peace Tax Fund” movement is active in something like 17 countries, and bills have been introduced in at least 7 national legislatures to create such funds.

Each bill and campaign is a little different, but they all appear to be essentially the same idea. The U.S. bill “would create a separate fund in the U.S. Treasury that can only be used for any government purpose that is not military in nature. This will allow a CO to check a box on the tax form, like the presidential election fund option, and pay their full tax liability, but have 100% of their tax obligation kept out of any war efforts. The instruction booklet would have an explanatory paragraph about what it means to be a CO. Levels of participation in this fund would be reported to Congress annually, and thus published in the Congressional Record,” says one source. It “will allow legally defined conscientious objectors to pay 100% of their taxes into a separate fund that will be used only for government spending that is not for a military purpose. The level of contribution to this fund will be annually entered into the Congressional Record, and information about the fund will be published in both the tax return form and the instruction booklet. The apportionment powers of Congress will not be restricted while relief of suffering will be granted to tens of thousands otherwise not able to earn above the taxable level of income or otherwise forced to refuse payment of taxes,” says another.

I have tried to identify the benefits of this legislation, as suggested by the campaigns’ promoters:

Sends a Message

Signals Government Approval of Conscientiousness

Increases Funds Available to Government

Relieves Suffering of War Tax Resisters

  • It would relieve the suffering of current war tax resisters, who would be able to go back to a legal, above-board, taxpaying life or earn a taxable income.

Miscellaneous

My most basic objection to this set of points is that I don’t believe that a bill that allows the government to have more money and to spend as much of it as it would like to on war is anything like a step in the right direction or anything war tax resisters ought to waste their time on. My secondary objection is that quite clearly some war tax resisters would indeed be deceived into feeling that they could again pay taxes with a clear conscience if a “peace tax bill” were passed — while in reality nothing in the moral equation would have changed. There’s no virtue in further clouding the moral challenge of taxation in this way.

Many of these other alleged benefits seem either unlikely or not worth these negative results. The symbolic, message-sending benefits are the most plausible, but seem just as attainable without the benefit of an act of Congress.

Only one page of the many I visited when searching for information on these “peace tax funds” even attempted to squarely address the most glaring flaws of the campaign:

“Conscientious objection to military taxation would legally parallel conscientious objection to military service. The work performed by conscientious objectors during the draft did not result in fewer soldiers going to war. Likewise, the tax dollars contributed by conscientious objectors to the Peace Tax Fund would not change budgetary priorities. Yet this does not diminish the power of either moral stand.”

But this is not accurate. When someone declared himself a conscientious objector that person did not take up arms and kill. Perhaps somebody else was drafted to do so instead, this is true, but that person, the conscientious one, did not. A “peace tax fund” payer, on the contrary, pays just as much money as the non-fund payer, but just cherishes the illusion that her dollars were peaceful ones. It would be as if the government told conscientious objectors that they had to take up arms and shoot at the enemy just like everybody else, but that they didn’t have to take credit for their kills if they didn’t want to.

The government can’t solve your moral dilemma for you by making a separate slot above the basket for conscientious people to pass their taxes through. That’s just silly, and makes “conscientious” people look not conscientious at all but naïve and easily bought-off.

So what are the alternatives?

Whether or not a “peace tax fund” is enacted, the basic problem of not wanting to contribute to activities you think are immoral remains the same, and tax resistance continues to be a good response to that problem. If the idea of a “peace tax fund” is attractive to you, I would suggest not waiting for the government to create one for you, but to go ahead and donate money directly to charities that you consider valuable. If merely the illusion of having paid taxes that were only used for peaceful purposes is enough for you, visualize every dollar that you paid going directly into the budget for your favorite government program (you can do this even without a “peace tax fund” bill and it will mean just as much).