Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
religious groups and the religious perspective →
Catholic churches →
Michael McCarthy
I’ll take a break today from the ongoing Evil and Human Agency-a-thon and cover some things I’ve been pushing to the side to make room for that increasingly bloated book review.
Next: Michael McCarthy, a leader of Blue Water Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization from Port Huron, Michigan, shares some post-tax-day thoughts about war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
The Gospel calls on us to defeat evil with good.…
[A] growing group — 10 to 15 members of five to six local churches — is taking its federal income tax dollars (in $100 amounts we name “Iraq Peace Bonds”) from supporting this war, and redirecting some of the money to local needs for public education — in this case, our county library.
We gave checks totaling $1,360, and are now in ongoing, collective, open civil disobedience to an unjust war tax.
Most taxpayers have withholding from their paychecks.
They overpay during a tax year and receive refunds.
This leaves no way to stop paying some portion for this unjust war.
So we have been fine-tuning our finances and W-4 allowances now, so that something will be owed at the end of this tax year .
The process is to withhold less now, so that each will pay $100 less for war .
Some of us already have done this for the tax year.
We file our 1040s, and pay the balance due, minus $100.
We notify the Internal Revenue Service and Congress, of what is owed, but hold it instead in a peace escrow account, or donate the money — to the library, for example.
We know the IRS still would bill us for that amount.
There are risks to this witness. Participants in this act of civil disobedience violate federal law.
We do this as a community, discussing details with friends, family, and tax preparers.
The IRS likely will respond with form letters within months requesting payment with penalty and interest that accrue at 1–2% monthly.
Therefore, an initial $100 Iraq Peace Bond could cost about $125 with IRS penalties and interest by the end of a year.…
And Eric Stoner and Bryan Farrell ask the readers of ZNet “Why Pay for War?”
Excerpts:
For those whose conscience demands action now, there is another option, carved out by a long history of war tax resisters.
According to the War Resister’s League, tens of thousands of Americans — including Dorothy Day, Joan Baez, and Noam Chomsky — have at some point resorted to civil disobedience by not paying their taxes .
Some resisters have deliberately chosen to live below the poverty line to avoid paying taxes, while others simply do not pay part or all of what the government demands for its addiction to war.
These actions no doubt come with risk and sacrifice, but it’s often not as bad as people think.
Only rarely has anyone lost their house or car or faced jail time, while many have resisted for decades without significant consequences.
The War Resisters League and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee offer numerous resources on their websites concerning every facet of this form of resistance, as well as contact information for local support groups.
While the U.S. government has been spendthrift when it comes to building its arsenal, Americans, by and large, have been the misers, refusing to pay any significant price for their convictions.
As Father Daniel Berrigan, no stranger to personal sacrifice, once remarked, “Because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course continues, because the waging of war, by its nature is total — but the waging of peace, by our cowardice is partial.”
Finally: this sort of news always brings a smile to my face.
Excerpts:
Two anti-war campaigners who broke into an airbase to sabotage US bombers at the outbreak of the Iraq war have been cleared of all charges.
Protesters Toby Olditch, 38, and Philip Pritchard, 36, used bolt cutters to enter RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
They had intended to clog the planes’ engines with nuts and bolts when they were arrested by Ministry of Defence police.
The men pleaded not guilty at Bristol crown court to conspiring to cause criminal damage, claiming the B52s would have been used to commit war crimes in Iraq.
Speaking outside court, Mr Pritchard said: “I am delighted.
It is a great relief — and a huge vote of confidence for anti-war protesters — that a jury were convinced that our actions were lawful.”
This is only the latest in a series of cases in which protesters seeking to disable American military equipment have been acquitted after raising the defense that they had been acting to prevent acts of criminal war.
While I was busy going through Friends Journal back issues, I didn’t attend much to American tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the interesting items that caught my notice:
Some Christian war tax resisters in Michigan held a small “Independence from
War Tax Day” demo that included symbolic burnings of tax forms.
“The common citizen is not being listened to,” wrote participant Michael J. McCarthy.
“We must learn to vote with our money, as the powerful do. April
15th becomes the new
second
Tuesday in November. This tax redirection is one of a number of lifestyle
changes that people can make to better participate in a real
community-responsible democracy.”
McCarthy also wrote up his thoughts for USCatholic.org.
Excerpts:
In , facing the probability that the Iraq
War was unjust, a group of Catholics in my community in Port Huron, Michigan,
openly informed
IRS
that we would redirect hundreds of dollars from our federal taxes, donating
this “Iraq Peace Bond” instead to our local library. Our donation was merely
a drop in the bucket of the trillions wasted in this war, but a small step in
a new direction. Most of the money was eventually recovered by
IRS,
but the donation still helps the community and serve as an inspiration to
find further methods to invest in the works of peace, not war.
The problem for us in the United States is non-cooperation with evil — a
difficult feat when so much of our tax money (more than 50 percent of all
federal income tax, or 25 percent of total income tax) is spent on war. There
are, however, alternative ways to turn away from it towards peacemaking. It
is possible to take some of the money you would have offered to the troubled
war economy and homeland security and spend it instead on the works of mercy,
from feed the hungry to investing in creative work opportunities for our
young people to donating to your local Christian pregnancy care centers.
You must inform the
IRS of
your intentions, and your wish to be a responsible citizen while also
divesting from this war economy. The dialogue that follows with them can be
kept cordial. For the practical measures, contact the National War Tax
Resistance Coordinating Committee. My wife and I have tried war tax
resistance/redirection for 17 of the 35 years of our marriage, with varied
results — some trial and tribulation, a lot of good done within our faith and
larger communities.
For years now, because I knew the
IRS was
out to get me at some point, I’ve kept the balance in my PayPal account very,
very low. Whenever I made pitches for donations, I withdrew the funds almost
immediately. But because my health has now gotten so much worse, I wasn’t
able to make as many trips as I wanted to the closest
ATM. It’s only a block and a half away,
but given my enormous difficulties in getting around, it might as well be a
couple of miles. The heat in
L.A. didn’t help,
either. That’s the reason there were still funds left for the
IRS to
get. My apologies and regrets again, both for all the kind donors and for my
sorry ass.
However, I’m not content to let the matter stand there. That is, I’m not
ready to lie down and die, which is what I’m certain they’d prefer. I
obviously have no money to pay an attorney or tax specialist, but if there is
anyone out there who would consider volunteering their expertise, I would
like to find out if there are any options with the
IRS at
this point. I should tell you that I don’t want to pay them a single damned
cent — I don’t choose to give funds to murderers and torturers, thank you
(which is why the IRS was after me in the first place) — and I’d also like to
get back at least some of the funds they’ve taken.
As I say, I suspected this might happen at some point, especially after
PayPal began filing tax forms starting with . I had thought about providing a warning to donors that the
IRS
might suddenly swoop down, so that you kind people would be forewarned. I’m
terribly sorry I didn’t do that. But since the IRS and I hadn’t communicated
at all for years now, I thought (hoped) they might have forgotten about me. I
mean, Jesus Christ, I have almost no money at all. And I didn’t
receive any warning at all before this levy was imposed.
And that’s another aspect of this that absolutely enrages me. I know, we all
know, that there are multibillion dollar companies (and individuals) who,
with the aid of their fleet of top line attorneys and financial experts, pay
next to no taxes at all — and in many cases, none, period. And yet these
bastards come after me.
Well, to hell with them. This has made me so angry that I feel I have a new
lease on life. With your help, I hope we can figure out a way around these
difficulties. And just to show them, I’ll live for another ten goddamned
years, and write another ten books’ worth of essays.
During the day, I tried to remember the last time I had any communication
from the
IRS.
I’m almost certain it was close to ten years ago. Ten years, during which I
had heard nothing at all. So I had thought that perhaps, mercifully, I’d
fallen off their radar. I guess that’s a lesson for all of us: they never
forget. If there is any way at all, they’ll get you in the end.
Before “sequestration” took effect, the Obama administration issued
specific — and alarming — predictions about what it would bring. There would
be one-hour waits at airport security. Four-hour waits at border crossings.
Prison guards would be furloughed for 12 days. FBI agents, up to 14.
At the Pentagon, the military health program would be unable to pay its bills
for service members. The mayhem would extend even into the pantries of the
neediest Americans: Around the country, 600,000 low-income women and children
would be denied federal food aid.
But none of those things happened.
Partially this is because Congress quietly made exceptions to the sequester in
some cases, but a lot of it is because all of the alarm was bluff, and when
agencies finally did have to cut their budgets, they found that there
was plenty of stuff they could cut fairly painlessly.
The act of screaming bloody murder while engaging in mostly-symbolic
belt-tightening seems to be a global phenomenon. In an article for
Negocios.com, Jorge Valín says, of the Spanish
version of budget cuts, “ ‘austerity’ doesn’t work (because it doesn’t exist).” Excerpts (my translation):
There is much debate on the issue of Government austerity. Those with a
leftist mindset accuse it of generating poverty, reducing welfare, and even
killing people when it comes to health. The rightists insist that government
spending has to be checked, and in this sense austerity is good.
, the
government has created three new bodies per month, whether commissions,
committees, councils, centers, or agencies of some type. The government
propaganda agencies receive more than a billion euros in additional subsidies
to what they had at the beginning of the economic crisis. In fact, government
spending grows year after year even without mentioning the exponential growth
of the debt. Austerity doesn’t work because it does not exist.
…It simply does not happen; it’s propaganda and a stalling measure. And the
big problem with austerity is that it is just another government program.…
The government, any government, is simply incapable of reducing its drag on
the economy or to eliminate its debt.
Unfortunately, the politicians are incapable of doing anything. They would
lose their power. So the other option is to force austerity on the state. The
politicians live on our work and there’s no moral or technical reason why
they have to plunder us with taxes this way. Tax resistance is not only a
moral position, it’s a necessity before a corrupt status quo in which
criminals prosper.
Tax reform
Some of our feckless legislators are trying to come up with some sort of
radical tax reform plan. Of course it’s unlikely that this Congress will ever
agree on much of anything, but some future Congress is likely to try to pass
something that they’ll call radical tax reform, so it’s worth at least keeping
an eye on things like this.
Of course, whatever they come up with will be awful. And the motivations of
the politicians will have a lot less to do with trying to make the tax system
better or more efficient (even by government standards), and more to do with
the fact that radical tax reform is an incredible shakedown opportunity, where
every deep-pocketed son of a bitch with a stake in tax subsidies will have to
pony up if they want to keep their cash cow alive.
But keep in mind that tax simplification, even when it’s accomplished
in such an ugly way, and even if it doesn’t shrink the budget by a
nickel, can still shrink government somewhat.
So there may yet be reasons to smile.
Taxpatriates
I didn’t make much noise about it last quarter, when the Treasury Department
announced its highest quarterly total number of people who had renounced their
U.S. citizenship
(679), as there was some indication that this had been an accounting fluke
caused by names being shifted from one quarter to another.
The educated guesses about why this recent surge of citizenship renunciations
has taken place say that it has less to do with people becoming increasingly
ashamed at having to call themselves Americans, or with eagerness to avoid
U.S. taxes, and more
to do with the onerous paperwork requirements that the
U.S. government
requires from its citizens — even of those who live overseas and who conduct
little activity back in the “land of the free.”
A more do-it-yourself approach to taxpatriatism was tried by the Gastonguay family, who fled the United States in part because they were upset at being “forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don’t agree with.”
They boarded a small boat and sailed for Kiribati, a remote set of islands with a total population of a little over a hundred thousand people, where they hoped their religious practices and beliefs would be better-tolerated.
But they never made it there, instead getting storm-tossed and lost at sea for three months before getting rescued and taken instead to Chile, from which, they said, they planned to return to the United States, at least for now.
Jerry Kirk of Searcy County, Arkansas, one of that odd crop of American tax
protesters who adhere to incredibly baroque legal systems of their own
devising, refused to pay his county taxes whereupon the government seized and
sold some of his property.
He responded by doing something I haven’t seen a tax protester of that ilk do
before: he redirected his unpaid taxes by handing out envelopes of money to
people in front of the county courthouse. Here’s a video of the event:
Let’s face it: As a marketing strategy, a 6.25 percent sale is embarrassing.
What car dealer has ever run ads saying “Today Only — Save Just Over A Nickel
On The Dollar!” When does Macy’s ever post “6.25 Percent Off!” over their
junior miss selection?
And yet, the sales tax holiday weekend is huge. The stores are packed. It’s
like a mini-Christmas in the dog days of August.
, when you see
Massachusetts shoppers waiting in long lines to buy stuff they could have
bought two days earlier without any hassles, they’re showing you just how
hard they will work to stick it to the state.
In more recent war tax resistance news:
Humans of New Mexico did an in-depth profile/interview with war tax resister Don Schrader.
The seed of peace, stresses this group, must be planted with coherent
actions. “This is the point where our individual consciences become a method
of social transformation, when we disobey the obligation to pay taxes for
military spending and declare this together and publicly.”
Michael McCarthy plugs war tax resistance in The Times Herald. Excerpt:
This Pentecost season when we call on the Holy Spirit to renew our faith,
let us resolve to take steps to stop giving Caesar our first fruits of
federal income tax with which to make war, and convert these monies to God’s
peacemaking purposes.
For the practical measures, risks, responsibilities and spiritual benefits
please contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating
Committee — nwtrcc.org — and seek prayerful
informed support within your faith community. Whether conservative, liberal,
tea party, radical or independent, some real investigation of national and
world affairs shows how badly our money is being spent.
Notes on issues for war tax resisters crossing the border, glitches with the latest tax bill, the difficulty in understanding IRS interest rates, new estate tax exemption limits.
Advice on starting a local war tax resistance support group, writing letters of protest to the IRS, and a review of “Walden: The Video Game.”
