The Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers to try and figure out how the ranks of “lucky duckies” (those American households who aren’t required to pay income tax) will expand or shrink in the coming years based on some different policy options.
They project that for 2012, for instance, between 45.7% and 46.3% of households will pay no federal income tax.
They simulated a bureaucratic organization and randomly assigned participants to be in a high-power role (prime-minister) or low-power role (civil servant).
The prime-minister could control and direct the civil servants.
Next, the researchers presented all participants with a seemingly unrelated moral dilemma from among the following: failure to declare all wages on a tax form, violation of traffic rules, and possession of a stolen bike.
In each case, participants used a 9-point scale (1: completely unacceptable, 9: fully acceptable) to rate the acceptability of the act.
However, half of the participants rated how acceptable it would be if they themselves engaged in the act, while the other half rated how acceptable it would be others engaged in it.
The researchers found that compared to participants without power, powerful participants were stricter in judging others’ moral transgressions but more lenient in judging their own:
“power increases hypocrisy, meaning that the powerful show a greater discrepancy between what they practice and what they preach.”
This effect is stronger when the powerful people believe they have come by their power legitimately or deservedly.
Peter J. Reilly continues his series touching on war tax resistance at his Forbes.com blog.
In this episode, he takes a second look at the court case in which William Ruhaak tried to assert a legal right to conscientious objection to military taxation, saying that Ruhaak’s argument isn’t so frivolous after all.
In another post, Reilly looks at the “paper tiger” of IRS tax enforcement, and shows how most taxpayers, if they keep their tax debt under $10,000, can get away with letting the statute of limitations expire and never have to pay it.
Cindy Sheehan has done a further write-up on her tax resistance: “I vowed that I would never, ever pay a penny to this government in the form of income taxes again, because: A) My oldest son was priceless to me and I feel this nation owes me and B) other people’s sons and daughters all over the world are precious to me and I refuse to fund their murder, torture, displacement, etc.… I will defer paying my taxes as long as slaughter abroad is the foreign policy of this government, economic terrorism is the paradigm here at home and the Bush mob continues to roam the world as unrepentant criminals.”
Some links that have whizzed by my screen in recent days:
Do we use our limited resources of time and money primarily to advance
the idea of war tax resistance and a legal peace tax fund for
conscientious objectors? Or do we use those resources to speak to the
larger policy framework and ethos? To put it crassly, do we advocate for
special accommodations for the few? Or do we confront the system that
says peace can be built through war and military force?
Jesus taught us to love not just our neighbours but also our enemies.
He showed us by his life and example how to resist evil not with
violence but with loving, persistent, firm, active non-violence. It was
this revolutionary patience on behalf of the poor and oppressed that,
humanly speaking, led to him being arrested, tried, tortured and
executed by the powers that be. The acts of witness that resulted in the
fines I have refused to pay were a form of conscientious objection.
Refusing to pay them is a continuation of that objection. It is a
privilege to be able to follow on the path that led Jesus to the way of
the cross and resurrection.
Italy
While everyone was busy watching the kerfluffle in Crimea, the people of Venice voted to restore the Venetian Republic and secede from Italy.
Italy itself is disregarding the vote and claiming that Venice has no authority
to secede. So the movement is moving on to stronger measures. They are taking
ideas from other separatist movements: The referendum itself was inspired by a
similar effort in Scotland, and they plan now to redirect their federal taxes
to the local government, which is a technique they picked up from the Catalan
nationalists.
Christiaan Elderhorst writes about the recent imprisonment of Toine Manders for his work counseling tax avoidance:
Toine Manders works at the Haags Juristen College (Hague Lawyers Board) and
specializes in tax avoidance. Manders refers to tax avoidance as a moral
duty. Tax revenue is used by the state to pay for war, prisons, the
militarization of the police force and the regulatory agencies which
constantly privilege big business. This moral duty is connected the Haags
Juristen College’s former business practice which was to help individuals
avoid the military draft. Avoiding the draft and avoiding taxes are both ways
by which personal contribution to state oppression and war is reduced.
Calling this a moral duty is not a far-fetched idea.
“Something has to happen at the grassroots, so that those on top notice how
much discontent there already is among the population,” says Höller. He was
actually a completely apolitical man, he stressed, but the scandals and the
squandering of tax money — “from Eurofighters to the Hypo bailout” — had
gotten on his last nerve. “Enough is enough.”
When I last visited the site with the article covering Höller’s case, it had a
reader poll attached to it that asked people to give their opinion of tax
resistance as a protest tactic:
Venezuela
I’m hearing a lot of buzz in the twitterverse about tax resistance as a
possible component of the ongoing demonstrations in Venezuela, but I haven’t
found much more solid information yet. Here’s an example:
“Don’t Pay Income Tax in Civil Disobedience. Tax Resistance! It is legitimate
and legal as enshrined in article 350 of our Constitution [‘The people of
Venezuela, true to their republican tradition and their struggle for
independence, peace and freedom, shall disown any regime, legislation or
authority that violates democratic values, principles and guarantees or
encroaches upon human rights.’]. Right now the Castro-communist regime is
transgressing the democratic values, principles, and guarantees and is
undermining the human rights of all Venezuelans. Don’t finance the regime!”
“These particularly impact on poor people,” he told the court. “We live in a
country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”
He claimed there were 20,000 people in Nottingham in council tax arrears.
“I refuse to pay in solidarity with and in support of the victims of
austerity measures. I encourage everyone in court, including the magistrates,
don’t pay up.”
Magistrates explained to Longhurst, who arrived with a large group of
supporters, that he was likely to go to prison if he refused to pay. Justices
even urged him to consult with a duty solicitor. But he confidently said he
he had spoken with a lawyer and he did not think there was any need for him
to see another one.
Another account adds that “[a]s he was led down to the cells by prison guards he was applauded by his supporters and one could be heard shouting: ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful.’ ”
One of his supporters, who did not want to be named, said afterwards: “It is
a travesty that he has been jailed. It is disgusting, he is an elderly man
who was trying to make a stand, he was trying to make the area a better place
and this is why he is now behind bars. He has worked and paid council tax,
but as all of us do, he got sick of it, he was braver than everyone because
he stood up for what he thought was right.”
The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:
Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn.
Excerpt:
“They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance.
Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime.
And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem.
Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”
Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned).
She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government.
If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined.
“I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.
At the NWTRCC blog, tax resister William E. Ruhaak shared his experience trying to get the government to acknowledge his carefully-drafted, personal “statement of conscience.”
He fought a determined pro se legal battle to get the U.S. Tax Court to admit his statement of conscience as evidence in his tax appeal.
He believes such a struggle is important in order to defend “The fundamental human right to publicly express an opinion or belief.
And also the right to have a written expression of that belief included in government documentation for future reference.”
The Court eventually gave in and added his statement as a piece of evidence, but seemingly only to humor him.
The ruling in his case reads in part:
We nevertheless admonish petitioner that instituting future proceedings before the Tax Court for the purpose of advancing frivolous arguments relating to his conscientious objection to the payment of Federal taxes is likely to result in the imposition of a significant section 6673 penalty against him.
We recognized four decades ago that “there has been a long and undeviating parade of cases in this and other courts” rejecting the arguments of conscientious objectors who sought to avoid paying “the part of their taxes which they estimated to be attributable to military expenditures and to which they objected because of their religious, moral, and ethical objections to war and because of their claimed ‘rights’ under various constitutional provisions, the Nuremberg Principles, international law, and numerous international agreements and treaties.”
Greenberg v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 806, 810 ().
At this late date, the Court will not condone the continued assertion of similar frivolous positions in meritless litigation that wastes both its own limited resources and those of the IRS.
The War Resisters League has released its annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart fliers, based on the Biden Administration’s proposed budget for .
As Pentagon spending continues to rise, and yet more millions are being spent to arm Ukraine, pie chart aficionados may be surprised to see that the military-spending slice of the pie chart seems to have noticibly shrunk this year.
Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn, who do the research and composition for the pie chart, explain why.
In part, the reason is that they are operating on the proposed budget, not whatever budget (and supplementary appropriations) Congress will eventually, tardily enact.
The Biden Administration’s proposed budget is chockablock with a wish list of non-military spending that Congress will probably not enact.
The absolute amount of military spending has risen substantially, but relatively it looks smaller because of all that extra wish list spending.
The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with a preview of the upcoming tax filing season and other news from the American war tax resistance scene.
The only thing that comes close to the problems we’re seeing now at the Internal Revenue Service was in 1985, when the agency was rolling out some new technology—technology it’s still using today.
Back then, the processing centers got so behind on their work that employees started hiding tax returns in closets and putting them in bags in the trash.
Now it’s way worse, with the IRS, for the second year in a row, entering the filing season with a backlog of millions of not yet processed returns and pieces of correspondence.
The current National Taxpayer Advocate released an amusing blog post about how pathetic and outdated the IRS processes for handling tax returns are. Excerpts:
When I released my annual report in , I said that paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite and the IRS is buried in it.
The reason paper returns are so challenging is that the IRS still has not implemented technology to machine read them, so each digit on every paper return must be manually keystroked into IRS systems by an employee.
The IRS has announced that it plans to hire thousands of new workers to try to deal with its paperwork backlog.
But, in a tight labor market, and unable to offer competitive pay rates to compensate for the soul-crushing tedium ($15.61/hour anyone?), they’re finding it a challenge to turn those plans into personnel.
The Washington Post took a look at a recent job fair the agency held.
IRS employees don’t follow the rules on paid time-off, with a suspicious pattern of sick leave days allowing employees to make their own three-day weekends and extended holidays.
Catalan separatist group / government-in-exile Council for the Republic is promoting a tax redirection campaign in which Catalan citizens withhold the portion of their taxes that would go to the Spanish monarchy or to its repression apparatus, and give that money instead to Front Republicà d’Acció Solidària or some such group working for Catalan independence.
Doomed, quixotic, gonzo tax resister John McAfee is trying to get in the last word by means of a set of interviews he gave when he was on the run from the law.
In them, he explains why he stopped paying. Excerpts:
I’d just had enough.
I’d paid $50 million in income tax over the years.
I thought that was plenty.
I hadn’t paid tax since I went to Belize, but technically, as an American citizen, even if you’re not living in the country, using the services and driving on the roads, you still have to file and pay 30% of your income to the United States.
The only two countries in the world that enforce that rule are the United States and Eritrea!
How [frigging] bizarre is that?
Anyway, I just said, “I’m sorry.
This is insane.
I’m not doing this anymore.”
[I]n America, income tax is in fact unconstitutional anyway.
It was only ever created to fund the war effort in , but that edict, like many others, was never extinguished after the need for it ceased to exist.
I was telling people that I thought taxes were illegal, and if they also felt that they were illegal and/or unjust they should just stop paying, too.
Not just that, I was showing them how to do it without getting caught.
I stumbled somehow on the No Obligation Challenge website.
It looks like a U.K. version of the familiar U.S. tax protester song-and-dance (“Did you know there is no law obligating you to pay council tax?”) but I was impressed by the quality of the graphic design and layout of the website, which is head and shoulders above what I usually see from that segment of the fringe.
