War Tax Resisters Shirley Smith and Andrew McKenna

Shirley Smith and Andrew McKenna of Austin Conscientious Objectors to Military Taxation were interviewed on the Austin cable TV libertarian opinion and news program Live & Let Live yesterday.

The show, which is available on-line at http://txliberty.dyndns.org/inetpub/wwwroot/webfiles/LL050226.wmv, starts with some delightfully righteous rants on current events that are everything you’d hope for and more from a libertarian local-access cable-TV show. The interview and irascible phoned-in questions start at the 21 minutes and 30 seconds mark in the show.

Tax policy junkies will like these links, which I’ve pulled from the ever-helpful TaxProf Blog:

• Direct from the U.S. Government Accountability Office comes the report 21^st Century Challenges: Reexamining the Base of the Federal Government in which you can learn fun facts like this: “American taxpayers paid about $1.9 trillion in combined federal taxes, including income, payroll, and excise taxes, in fiscal year 2004. These taxes, along with over $4 trillion in deficit borrowing, funded the federal government.”
• IRS statistics about the 2003 class of tax returns have been released and one helpful person took the data and released it as a spreadsheet for those of us who like to muck around with numbers.
• The Tax Foundation has put out its latest edition of Facts and Figures on Government Finance and has put a handful of sample chapters on-line.
• So you’ve heard that Dubya wants to reform the tax code? Find out all you want to know about the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.
• And when it comes time to debating the recommendations of this panel, you’ll want to remember where you bookmarked the Budget Options report from the Congressional Budget Office. It looks at some of the repercussions of 53 different possible tax reforms.
• The U.S. Treasury Department released their explanation of where the money is coming from for the latest budget: General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2006 Revenue Proposals. Within that budget is ten and a half billion dollars for the IRS — which they in turn explain in their report, The Budget in Brief FY 2006.