From the Chicago Tribune comes this profile of tax resister Karl Meyer:
Karl Meyer lives in a community of Tennessee pacifists and survives with the help of a vegetable garden and bread foraged from the trash behind a Nashville bakery.
A carpenter who earns most of his income during the 2½ months he works in Chicago every year, Meyer lives simply and tries to keep his income low to avoid paying taxes to the military.
Even when he does earn enough to owe income taxes, as he did last year, he doesn’t file, in a protest against defense spending. He has done jail time for income tax evasion, and the IRS once seized his Chevrolet station wagon.…
“I just don’t believe in it,” said Meyer, 67. “I believe if we had spent an equivalent amount of money on development around the world, we wouldn’t have an enemy out there.”…
Tax resisters’ methods vary. The most defiant don’t file at all or send in specious IRS forms as a statement, as Meyer has done. They may claim as dependents the entire population of the Earth or all poor Americans.
Others, often self-employed, do not withhold taxes from their earnings and refuse to write the IRS a check on April 15. And still others take a legal but self-sacrificing approach: making sure their income is so small that they don’t have to pay taxes. For most taxpayers under 65 in , that means $7,950 for a single person or $15,900 for a married couple filing jointly[sic].…
Timothy Godshall, outreach and development director at the National Campaign for a Peace Tax in Washington, asks his employers to keep his pay below a taxable level.
“Whether I’m the one who’s actually fighting in the military or I’m paying my earned dollars to have someone else fight or to have weapons produced, I don’t see a moral difference between those two,” he said.
Chicago resident Carol Rose intentionally keeps her income below taxable levels as co-director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which has offices in Chicago and Toronto. The group sends volunteers to areas of conflict to do work such as escorting Palestinian children to school or drawing up human rights reports in Iraq.
Rose said she once surprised a Mennonite church where she was pastor by asking for a salary cut.
Meyer, who long lived in Chicago, tried to stir up a tax protest here in by filing 365 frivolous tax forms — one for every day of the year. But he said he no longer hears from the IRS.
“They want publicity where people are quaking in their boots,” Meyer said, “not where a person says I’m not afraid of you in the least, and I will never pay for the things you are spending money for.”
Nice article, though the journalist manages to step in my pet peeve of exaggerating the difficulty of getting under the tax line. Don’t you wish there were some sort of common journalistic clearinghouse where you could go to clear up popular misconceptions like this so they don’t just get repeated over and over again until they take on the appearance of fact?
I worry that the journalists may actually be getting this misinformation from the war tax resisters themselves. The news that you don’t have to live under the poverty line to live under the tax line has travelled slowly through tax resistance circles, alas.
