Get Ready to Fill Out a New W-4 Form… or Maybe Not

I got excited about the possibility that American employees would need to file new W-4 forms with their employers because of the changes in the new tax law that is coming into effect at the beginning of next year. This would give them an opportunity to reduce or eliminate their federal income tax withholding and thereby to potentially join the ranks of the resisters.

But the IRS has since said that it will try to adjust its withholding tables so that for many employees, their previously-filed W-4 forms will do a good-enough job for now.

Add that task, however, to the long list of things the IRS will have to do to adjust to the new law. Congress has not given the agency any additional budget, but has put a lot of the burden of interpreting the law on it. People are already salivating over the opportunities to game the new law, and only an understaffed and demotivated IRS stands in their way.

From the New York Daily Worker of 28 December 1932:

Farmers’ Discontent in England

A dispatch to the New York Times, hidden away on an inside page, throws light on the growing discontent of farmers in Great Britain. They are beginning to refuse to pay taxes, in this case a tithe due a college of Oxford University.

Sixty policemen, some of them disguised as farm laborers, set out before dawn hidden in moving vans to seize the farmers’ live stock for taxes due. The solidarity of the farmers’ neighbors defeated this endeavor, however, for all the live stock, cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry had been hidden on neighboring farms. The police expedition returned to headquarters with two chickens as the net bag for the day.

Discontent among the farming class is world-wide today — it remains for the farmers to awaken from the illusion that the capitalist government will or can do anything to relieve their plight. They must fight side by side with the working class for the overthrow of the profit system that is ruining them both.