Citizens of Iceland are required to register their religious affiliation
with the government, which then doles out tax money proportionally to the
various denominations. Thousands of citizens who are fed up with this
government subsidy of religion are flocking to a newly-revived ancient
Sumerian religion, Zuism, whose officials promise to refund all of their subsidy to the members of its church.
India
The Times of India story
describes it as a “threatened” tax strike, but quotes in the article
suggest that the strike has already begun. Residents of Jaivishwabharti
Colony in Aurangabad have decided to withhold property tax in protest
against the government’s failure to provide basic municipal services.
Mexico
Residents of Uruapan have started
withholding
municipal taxes and using the money to fund private Neighborhood Watch
groups, in exasperation at the inability of law enforcement to protect them
from criminals. Resisters are also refusing to pay certain utility
rates.
President Zuma abruptly fired his finance minister, whom many saw as the only person willing to apply brakes to Zuma’s profligate and corrupt spending.
Investor confidence in the South African markets, debt, and currency took a big hit, and South African taxpayers began to consider cutting off Zuma at the source.
The Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance, which had spearheaded an earlier campaign against road tolls, immediately announced that it was considering a broader tax revolt, but judging from how many people are tweeting tax refusal vows along with their #ZumaMustFall hashtags, the organization had better hurry if it wants to be at the head of the parade.
Spain
War tax resisters in Bilbao took to the military barracks to hang up
signs denouncing military spending, including a ten-foot-tall human
silhouette cutout labeled “890€” which is the amount the group estimates
each person in Spain is forced to spend on the military annually. “This
enormous amount of money comes from our taxes,” one explained, “so every
year in Bilbao we open our tax resistance office where we give people the
opportunity to disobey this injustice, refusing the payment of part of
their taxes that are devoted to military spending and redirecting them to
social ends.”
In “I Gave My Waitress a ‘Libertarian Tip’: Taxation Is Theft!” Ed Krayewski considers the tactic of leaving cash “gifts” when paying for restaurant meals with your credit card, rather than adding a “tip” to the bill, as a way of trying to keep the tip from registering as anyone’s taxable income.
Some tabs that have arisen in my browser in recent days:
Add Michael Bowman to that short list of Americans who have followed their anti-abortion convictions through to tax resisting conclusions.
Bowman objects to his tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood, and has been resisting taxes .
He was recently indicted for what the government insists is his “frivolous” objection.
Bowman explains his stand in this video.
In part he is trying to use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Hobby Lobby case to further his legal stand, a strategy American war tax resisters have also considered.
PopularResistance.org covers CodePink’s new “Divest from the War Machine” campaign.
It’s frustrating to read.
The aim of the project is “to redirect U.S. tax dollars from the war economy and into the peace economy.”
But rather than forthrightly redirecting their own tax payments at the source, the campaigners plan to try to lobby institutions to reduce their investments in the profits of military contractors in the hopes that this will have some effect somehow someday.
Why take this winding, dusty back-road to your destination when there’s a paved expressway?
There’s an interesting trend suddenly emerging in which consumer brands are trying to get a public relations boost by taking action against the government or stepping in to replace it.
In these cases: Country Time Lemonade offering to provide free legal assistance to children who are fined or otherwise harassed by The Man for setting up lemonade stands, and Domino’s Pizza filling potholes that have gone unfilled by the ostensibly responsible governments.
Under the Jacob Zuma regime in South Africa, the tax agency became so corrupt and unwilling to confront tax evasion by political elites, that a country with high “tax morale” (relative willingness by citizens to pay taxes voluntarily) has now become one in which “more and more South Africans have simply stopped paying their taxes…
In the eyes of many experts, the government’s — and the country’s — ability to right itself is at stake.”
Breizh-Info reports on the craze of destroying traffic ticket issuing bots in France.
While the Bonnets Rouges of Brittany probably deserve some credit for getting the ball rolling on this, the acts have spread to other regions of France.
And “with rare exceptions,” says the reporter, “the culprits are never found or denounced.”
A peace activist convicted for his role in a demonstration against the Navy base being constructed on Jeju Island has refused to pay his fine, opting to serve 46 days in prison instead.
I’ve covered the case of anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman a few times before.
He managed to get a hung jury in his previous trial, but then the judge decided he’d prefer a conviction and so refused to allow Bowman to present key parts of his defense during the retrial.
That strikes me as a significant thumb on the scales of justice, but such is how things go in the United States these days.
In any case, at his retrial without benefit of a jury Bowman was convicted and was recently sentenced to probation and $138,026 in restitution.
He says also that the court case has financially ruined him.
He plans to appeal.
War tax resister Alan Barnett has died.
Barnett organized a phone tax resistance group in California during the Vietnam War that included hundreds of resisters.
Spray paint seems to be the tool of choice in the latest human attacks on traffic ticket robots.
People blinded the cameras with paint in the United States, Germany, and France, while other methods were used elsewhere in France.
There’s a roadblock to the Democrats’ plans to use increased IRS enforcement to bring in more money to pay for their ambitious federal budget:
The fact that under Congressional budgeting rules, increasing the IRS budget counts as an expense, but increases in tax revenue that might be expected as a result don’t offset that expense.
Which means Congress has to jump through extra hoops to justify that extra spending.
Republicans smell blood in the water, and suspect that beefing up such IRS tax enforcement might not be politically popular.
They hope they can exploit anti-tax-snoop sentiment to stymie Democratic spending priorities.
The IRS expects to lose 52,000 of its 83,000 employees to retirement over .
Hiring freezes and budget cuts have aged its workforce.
But now they’re going on a hiring spree to try to make up for it.
