How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → conferences & gatherings → Fall 2013 NWTRCC national in New York City

The August issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is now on-line, with contents including:

• Perspectives on whether or not to pay the “social security tax” by Ruth Benn, myself, Susan Miller, and Larry Dansinger
• Notes about an especially aggressive IRS levy of Social Security payments, and about the agency’s retreat from its overzealous infliction of “frivolous filing” penalties on people who added messages of protest to their tax forms
• Reviews of Brayton Shanley’s The Many Sides of Peace: Christian Nonviolence, the Contemplative Life, and Sustainable Living and Rosalie G. Riegle’s Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community
• A note about an Independence Day war tax protest at which IRS forms went up in flames, and about pioneering war tax resister Juanita Nelson’s 90^th birthday
• Some resources that would be appropriate for the upcoming “Nuclear Free Future Month”
• News about the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering and the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters
• A profile of war tax resister Cathy Deppe

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• NWTRCC (the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee) is holding its Fall, 2013 gathering in New York City from November first through third.
• PBS NewsHour did a special report on the BerkShares variety of alternative currency that has been used in Berkshire County, Massachusetts since 2006.
• Robert Fernandes of Forks Township, Pennsylvania, paid his $7,143 in property taxes with 7,143 dollar bills, as a way of making a protest against paying for public schools that his children don’t attend. “We don’t even use the public system, yet I am being forced to pay all this money into a public scool system. I don’t think that’s really either fair or just or even ethical. It would be the equivalent if McDonald’s were to force vegetarians to pay for their cheeseburgers.” Friends of Fernandes videotaped the action and put it on-line. “I wanted to create a visual,” said Fernandez, as a way to help taxpayers “see exactly how much taxes is being stolen from them.”
• The percentage of households in the U.S. who are among the “lucky duckies” who pay no federal income tax is beginning to recede slightly. But Howard Gleckman, at the Forbes blog, wonders if we’ve been overcounting ducks this whole time. There are a surprising number (millions) of people in the U.S. who fail to file income tax returns even though they have had taxes deducted from their meager wages all year and are probably due refunds. Because they don’t file returns, they are usually categorized as non-paying “lucky duckies” — but because they have had taxes withheld from their paychecks, they really don’t belong in that category.
• Voters in Colorado decided to finally legalize recreational marijuana use. But the prohibitionists are fighting back by trying to enact a prohibitive tax on marijuana that would effectively recriminalize it — forcing it back into the black market and erasing many of the benefits of legalization. Legalization promoters there responded with a free marijuana give-away program in Denver (some coverage here, here, here, and here).
• I missed this when it first came out in April, but here is Michael Izbicki’s note on “Why (and how) I’m refusing to pay war taxes.”
• Here’s yet another “suspicious white powder” incident at an IRS facility.
• Thanks to NWTRCC’s War Tax Talk blog for linking to my discussion of the varieties of tax resister in the American war tax resistance movement.

Here are a few things of interest to flash by my screen in recent days:

• Here’s a short film on the Dublin anti-water charge movement of the 1990s, being used to inspire the household tax resisters today (and, it appears, to boost the public image of Joe Higgins, a Dublin politician who has hitched his wagon to the tax resistance star):

• NWTRCC held its Fall, 2013 earlier this month in New York City. Word about what took place at the gathering is still trickling out, but meanwhile here are some photos.
• A new project — Your Faith, Your Finance — has been launched as a joint project of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility and Quaker Peace & Social Witness. It aims to help Christians in the United Kingdom “explore ethical and spiritual issues around the use of money.” Their website has a section on taxes that gives a half-hearted nod in the direction of conscientious tax resistance:

  A small number of self-employed people have chosen to withhold part of their tax in protest over how it is spent. This is usually based on an objection to expenditure on war and preparations for war. Some of these individuals have had their goods seized or been imprisoned, although others have paid up after withholding payment for a while to make a point. This action is not of course open to people whose income tax is taken directly from their wages.

  and quotes English Quaker war tax resister Simon Heywood:

  “I withheld the military proportion of my income tax for two years during the Iraq War. I felt I had no choice: if others were going to risk their lives on my behalf, for this nonsense, I had to risk some of my own personal convenience to protest against the waste and folly. I was summonsed before the magistrate and told I had thirty days to pay. I paid up on day twenty-nine, having discovered some foe making arrangements to pay up behind my back. It was all spectacularly unheroic. I’m glad I did it though. It was very slightly less unheroic than paying up on time.”

A couple of bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council (IRSAC) released its annual report today. It begins by confirming one of my cherished hopes:

  [P]rior year and proposed budget cutbacks have so diminished IRS effectiveness that most taxpayers are now experiencing increased compliance costs. This undermines the voluntary tax system, reduces government revenues and promotes the underground economy.

• Information about the recent NWTRCC national gathering in New York City is starting to trickle out. NWTRCC social media coordinator Erica Weiland has a blog post about the event and you can also read the coordinating committee meeting minutes.

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out. Contents include:

• Ruth Benn reports back from the Fall 2013 NWTRCC national gathering in New York City
• remembering the recently departed war tax resister Sallie Marx
• some notes on how war tax resisters are approaching the new legal landscape of Obamacare
• Conscience U.K. explains their campaign to allow conscientious objectors to contribute to nonviolent national security solutions
• notes on the recent New England gathering and on some other war tax resistance actions around the country
• a profile of resister Ruby Phillips