A similar movement is sweeping Argentina. A viral video, featuring small business-owners complaining that they cannot survive if 60% of their earnings are swept up by the government and their businesses are locked down, has touched a nerve, and the #RebeliónFiscal has spread like wildfire.
The Catalan independence movement has relaunched a federal tax resistance campaign. Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has asked Catalonians to redirect the portion of their federal taxes that would otherwise go to support the Spanish monarchy, giving that money instead to the “Republican Fund for Solidarity Action” which will devote the funds to CoViD-19 relief efforts. The campaign is organized via the #ProuMonarquia site.
I’m used to seeing on-again/off-again tax strikes in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now the tactic seems to have spread to Ituri. Though a local government committee denounced the idea, a more grassroots group has insisted on withholding taxes until the government takes steps to improve security in the region.
War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:
Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death.
But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.
The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity.
This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich.
And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government.
In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign.
Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign.
But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.
Some links of interest:
The council tax resistance campaign that is part of the opposition to the Edmonton Incinerator has so far attracted eleven tax resisters.
As previously reported, the version of the “Build Back Better Act” passed by the House did not include a feared provision that would require banks to report to the IRS about more of their customers’s accounts and transactions.
There was a long-shot chance that those provisions would reappear in the bill as passed by the Senate, but thusfar no such provisions have appeared in the Senate’s version of the bill.
There is still some chance that the bill will be amended in the Senate to include such provisions, and I believe it’s not unheard of for provisions to get tacked on during the reconciliation process even if they weren’t in the versions of the bill that passed in either of the houses.
So we won’t know for sure until the bill hits Biden’s desk.
But I wouldn’t lose sleep.
One of the bill’s provisions would remove the requirement that IRS agents get written approval from their supervisors before assessing penalties against a taxpayer.
My gut feeling is that this isn’t a big deal (contra the Titanic alarm in the linked-to article about it).
It might make it marginally easier for the agency to apply penalties, or somewhat more likely that those penalties will be applied in inconsistent and haphazard ways.
But I suspect it mostly amounts to the trashing of a red-tape, rubber-stamp provision that didn’t have much practical effect.
The tax filing deadline came and went in the United States.
Now that fewer people are filing last-minute paper returns, this is less of a spectacle than it once was, but war tax resisters still like to mark the occasion as a sort of ceremonial holiday.
For example, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Taxes for Peace group redirected taxes from the government to useful groups.
The People’s Life Fund in California also redirected $61,000 of would-be tax dollars to better causes.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued yet another report.
According to them, the IRS still had about four and a half million unprocessed paper tax returns to get through as of , only a couple hundred thousand less than they started the year with, while meanwhile half a million new returns had come in and hadn’t been processed.
The agency had a goal of hiring 5,473 new submission processing employees to cope with this, but as of , they’d managed to onboard only 521.
