How you can resist funding the government →
other ways the government is funded →
excise taxes →
fuel tax
I’m hunting for ideas for people who want to make up for the money I’m not paying into the government treasury. Use the email link off to the left to send me your ideas.
Ways you can support the federal government
Have a smoke!: For every pack of cigarettes you buy, the manufacturer will donate 39 cents to the federal government — this is above and beyond the tax you paid on the income to buy the ciggies, the payroll taxes paid by the tobacco industry, state taxes, and payoffs to various lawsuit-happy attorneys general!
Pay at the pump!: For every gallon you put in your car, the feds get another 18-and-a-half cents to spend.
(Again, above and beyond…)
Earn Income!: For every six or seven dollars you earn (on average), you’ll give one of those dollars to be spent by the U.S. Congress.
Raise that mug!: At the bottom of every pint of beer is a federal excise tax nickel.
The feds get 21 to 67 cents for your bottle of wine. Finish off that bottle of hard liquor and your Senator has another $2.14 to argue over.
Enjoy Burning Man!: Half the price of your ticket goes straight to the federal Bureau of Land Management — what they don’t use to buy night-vision goggles and bong-seeking-missiles for use on the playa they get to keep as profit.
Go shooting!: A sweet 10–11% of the cost of your firearm, and your shells and cartridges go to help Congress figure out new ways to interfere with your right to bear arms.
(As always, above and beyond…)
Other federal excise taxes apply to cars and car parts, tires, coal, fishing equipment, vaccines, phone service, air travel, water travel, heavy vehicles and probably a bunch of other things.
Can you help me with my list?
Today: a roundup of some things I’ve found on-line:
Silence and Courage: Income Taxes, War and Mennonites :
An interesting paper from the Mennonite Central Committee that gives a good overview of the history of the income tax and its close association with war.
If it seems awful to you that fully half of your income tax dollar goes to pay for military spending, you might be surprised to find that this is a historically low percentage — in , 92.4% of the money raised by the federal income tax went to the military.
This paper also discusses the response of Mennonite institutions to war taxes.
Mennonites in the United States took unpopular stands against paying for war bonds during World War Ⅱ, but most didn’t argue with the income tax.
The paper quotes a letter from the Hutterian Brethren to Lord Frederich von Zerotin of Moravia in in which they plead for some way to be considered good citizens without paying war taxes:
“Our greatest fear, however… is that only the name, but not the tax would be changed, so that we would be led into it before we could turn around.
If we then discovered that it was used for war or other purposes we oppose, this would distress us greatly.”
The paper’s authors ask:
“When the government introduced a permanent mass income tax during WWⅡ, did the tax for war (war bonds) change in name only?
Did the government overcome our refusal to purchase war bonds, by creating a mandatory income tax which was used for the same purposes?”
If this page of testimony is anything to go by, Mennonite tax resistance has become more substantial in recent years.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki is part of Ralph Raico’s analysis of Harry Truman’s presidency.
It puts the lie to many of the revisionist myths that still cloud the memory of these bombings in the United States.
He quotes Leó Szilárd, a physician who worked on the Manhattan Project:
“If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
(Here’s an interview with Szilárd in which he reflects on the bomb.)
The Borgen Project is trying to dramatize the contrast between the cost of addressing global problems like, say, getting rid of recklessly-distributed landmines, providing safe water to people without it, or charitably retiring the debt of developing nations, with, say, the U.S. budget for Star Wars or for stealth bombers.
Brian Doherty asks us to go Beyond Conventional Thinking — ignore the political conventions and newsblahblah and advertisement:
“Believers in progressive politics who are interested in the arts and experiments-in-living, as they so often are, have much more to offer the world — and, if I may be so bold, their own lives — by producing art and experiments in living rather than indulging in electoral politics…
While attempting to perfect the entire world, or even an entire nation, is inherently futile and impossible, attempting to make our own lives, and those of our immediate family, friends, and block, successful and peaceful and cared for is something within the realm of possibility.
And it’s a path whose rewards (and, of course, failures) would be real and immediate and fulfilling.
But it is, make no mistake, harder than voting, or getting out the vote, or attending political conventions, or writing about them…
The people who try to forge something new — whether an object, or a technology, or a way of life — will change and benefit the world far more directly than any conventioneer or politician is likely to, and probably have more fun doing so.”
I take him even more seriously since he’s using the Burning Man festival as his case-in-point (he’s written a book on the subject).
Some links that have floated through my facemask in recent days:
Thousands of IRS Employees Are Currently Home With Pay, But Not Working is the sort of headline that brings a smile to my face.
The gist of the accompanying article is that most of the IRS workforce has been sent home to avoid infecting one another at the office, but only a minority of the employees are equipped to work from home.
The rest continue to collect paychecks, but have nothing to do.
People are travelling less, commuting less, and shipping less. As a result, people are burning less motor vehicle fuel, and as a result large drops in gasoline excise tax revenue are expected.
The hashtag #RebeliónFiscal is trending on the Twitter, as small business owners in Argentina plot a tax strike.
The business owners are upset that the government has offered them no tax relief as business activity has gone into an epidemic-induced slump.
They’re joined by antiauthoritarian activists and by the general public, who are throwing coordinated cacerolazos (noisy pot-and-pan banging protests) from the windows of their apartments as they remain sequestered.
Now, while mostly at home, we find plenty of things to do, but running out to a big demonstration is not one of them.
This got me thinking about war tax resistance as a perfect protest for the isolated.
That led me to think of the many individual acts of resistance in antiwar history and thus to Ammon Hennacy and his “one man revolution.”
