I got some email tonight:

I figure I’ll write you this e-mail because something was bugging me about the article you wrote. I believe that all human beings, no matter what nationality they are have the right to think and believe what they want to. It should be an inalienable right, because it’s one of the few things that makes us a human being. But my main question is that if you think the government is so bad, why you don’t just leave the country. Drive up to Canada, or down to Mexico, and live there? You won’t have to pay taxes to the US anymore, but I think you may not want to give up the freedoms you are using in writing this article. In most countries, writing an article like this would get you jail time, or worse, death for treason. I’m not 100% sure if that’s the way you see it, because obviously I don’t know you. If you have a problem with this country, simply leave. No one is stopping you from moving out of the country, but you need to remember that depending on where you go, you may not have the same freedoms you have here. The freedom to make choices that could be against your government, and using your voice is one thing that a lot of people in this country take for granted. And while it may seem like some use them, most of them don’t realize that this is a right that is secured by this government, and that the protests will not be suppressed by the government. In most countries, these rights, and even some of the most basic rights are not guaranteed, and are being oppressed every day.

This is one of the reasons why we fight, to secure the rights for others that it seems so many Americans take for granted. And this is another reason why so many countries have animosity towards us, because even though we use the rights, usually the people exercising the rights aren’t completely educated (i.e., the war protesters saying we are attacking Iraq for oil), or simply because too many Americans don’t care about exercising these rights. I’m not placing you in any of these categories, but I am interested in your thoughts on these issues.

Your main question is: “If you think the government is so bad, why don’t you just leave the country?”

The answer depends on the spirit in which you are asking the question. If you are just asking whether I’ve considered relocating to another country as a way of living on less money, avoiding support of the U.S. government, getting out from under the thumb of Uncle Sam, spending my suddenly large bank of free time by traveling, and so forth — I have considered this and am considering it. I’m not too worried about threats to my freedom of expression in Mexico or Canada, but perhaps I’m naïve about this.

I don’t see the option of taking up residence in another country and paying taxes there as being much of a solution, because, as you say, in many other countries the governments are even more disagreeable than in mine.

It sounds though like what you’re really asking is this: If you hate the government so much, why don’t you leave its country — what makes you think you’re still welcome here?

The answer to this question is different. I don’t believe this country belongs to the U.S. government. I don’t believe that by “having a problem with” the government, I become less invested in the place where I was born, where I grew up and where I live. In short, I think that it’s the government that’s the problem, and that if push comes to shove it’s the government that should leave the country, not its people.

When I started doing tax resistance, someone predictably asked me why I didn’t just leave if I hated this country so much. I gave my own predictable answer right back.

There are those who do renounce their citizenship and leave the U.S., many in order to avoid paying its taxes. Now they have their own web page, the Official Taxpatriates Page.

The subject of my blog and my tax resistance came up today at my weekly Spanish lesson, and I allowed myself to daydream again of moving South of The Border, Fred Reed style, and setting myself up somewhere outside the immediate sphere of Uncle Sam.

Coincidentally, Tax Talk has a column today about the domestic tax consequences of income earned outside the country:

A U.S. citizen or resident can exclude up to $80,000 in wages earned in a foreign country. This means that the person actually has to live in the foreign country and earn the wages for work performed in that country. To claim the exclusion, a citizen can either be a bona fide resident of that foreign country or spend more than 330 days in 12 months outside the United States. However, U.S. residents only qualify under the 330-day rule.

If you qualify as a bona fide resident, you can spend more than 35 days in the United States, provided you maintain your residence in that foreign country. To qualify as a bona fide resident, you actually have to be living in that foreign country on a more-permanent basis, and you actually have to live there for a whole tax year to qualify. For example, if you move now, you wouldn’t be a bona fide resident until tax year 2006. You could only get a partial exclusion for 2005 based on the 330-day rule. In addition, the rules state:

An individual with earned income from sources within a foreign country is not a bona fide resident of that country if:

1. The individual claims to be a nonresident of that foreign country in a statement submitted to the authorities of that country.
2. And the earned income of the individual is not subject, by reason of nonresidency in the foreign country, to the income tax of that country.

For example, if on the immigration forms you are asked your country of residence, you would have to say that country, not the United States. The fact that you don’t pay taxes in and of itself is not detrimental to the exclusion. For example, if you say you’re a resident, but you ignore your filing obligations, you could still be considered a bona fide resident.

Mmmmm… daydreamy…

Some news-in-brief:

• The New York Times today notes that there seems to be an uptick in the number of expatriate Americans who are renouncing their citizenship in order to stop being on the hook for taxes to the U.S. — “the only developed country that taxes its citizens while they live overseas.”
• Foreign Policy In Focus looks at how the U.S. defense budget could be cut by $62 billion in waste and pork without putting a dent in the ability of our nation to slaughter as many foreigners as is our wont.
• The Alameda Times-Star reports on upscale Berkeley dumpster-diving: “I’m not hungry,” Cynthia Powell said. “I do it because it’s good food, it’s free and it’s conservation.”

Maybe you’ve heard people threaten to leave the U.S. rather than continue to support and be embarrassed by its government. “Katchita,” who blogs at sexless berlin, made good on her threat. I thought her story was an interesting one:

…[I]t’s been a long path, difficult at times. In 2003 I took a leave of absence from work to go back to school, which helped me put my name on a few less bombs earmarked for Iraq. But that wasn’t enough, so in 2005 I became a war tax resister, diverting the 30+ percent “current military” expenditures to deserving non-profits, including the Center for Constitutional Rights for its work against torture. But that was not enough, because in 2006 the U.S. Internal Revenue Service began coming after me in earnest, and seized money from my U.S. bank account (fortunately very little was left). I decided to leave my job in California because the IRS would have proceeded to garnish money from my wages. I managed to stay one step ahead, having earned a U.S. grant to come to Germany for the 2006–2007 academic year. So far I’ve been able to stay in Europe. I’m happy that I’ll meet goal #1 and manage to stay “out” at least until George Bush leaves office in 10 months. My second goal, which stretches into the unknown, but hopefully not interminable, future, is to stay out until the war ends. Every year is a struggle for economic survival coupled with the need to renew that all-important residency visa.

The folks over at MetaFilter reminded me of the “Permanent Tourist” (a.k.a. “Prior Taxpayer”).

In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist. A person who is just “Passing Through.” The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.

I’m sure there are disadvantages to being a refugee without a country, too, but it seems to fit some people just fine, and there’s a heartstring of mine that tends to hum in harmonic sympathy when the topic comes up.

Of course, Uncle Sam wants to get his hands on his share of your money no matter where you earn it, so this is no panacaea (or, anyway, you’ve gotta stay on guard).

Some bits and pieces from around the great big web:

• One way to avoid paying taxes to whatever jurisdiction is lording it over you would be to move to another jurisdiction. The problem is figuring out how to take your assets with you before the folks in the revenue office figure out what you’re up to. Kathleen Macaulay has written up her advice for people considering what she calls the “ultimate estate plan” — taxpatriatism — in the wake of new laws that changed the rules for U.S. taxpatriates this year.
• Matthew Yglesias notes that the news media allowed themselves to be used as a propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, shamelessly and without remorse. To which IOZ responds — allowed themselves? hell — they’re an essential part of the military-industrial complex. Who do you think owns NBC?
• Trying to convince folks that their tax dollars might be better spent by anyone but the Pentagon? You could do worse than pointing to them to a new report from the Center for Defense Information about Pentagon waste and budgetary shenanigans.
• Bureaucrash, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s attempt to make capitalist ideology hip and exciting to the Internet generation, is sponsoring a “crasher challenge” — “a monthly drive to inspire activism on a specific issue. We’ll help provide the initial resources to help you and other crashers get your creative juices flowing and we encourage you to share those resources that you create. At the end of the month, the best submission (i.e. video, documented crash, writing, etc.) will be rewarded with Contraband t-shirts and props on Bureaucrash Social.” This month’s challenge is called Stop Wars and it would be ideal for a project that ties taxation to warfare.
• Fans of alternatives to government monopoly currency may want to keep an eye on OurNexChange, an Ashland, Oregon based “time dollar”-like currency that looks as though it will be mashed up with a LETS-style database. Beware, though, they don’t seem to have any interest in making this a challenge to the IRS, and are already building in mechanisms to report your barter and alternative currency earnings to the government.

The government of Delhi, India, is trying to extend its sales tax to cover the services lawyers provide to their clients. The lawyers are fighting back.

Lawyers in district courts of the capital observed strike Thursday to oppose the imposition of service tax on law firms.

Around 20,000 lawyers in Delhi abstained from work, paralyzing the lower courts.

No advocate appeared in the cases in Patiala House, Tis Hazari, Karkardooma, Rohini and Dwarka courts.

The cases listed for the day were adjourned, a Delhi Bar Association office bearer said.

“The lawyers of India will not tolerate any attempt by the government to impose service tax on the legal fraternity and shall adopt all peaceful means to oppose such uncalled and unwarranted taxes,” the coordination committee of All Bar Associations of Delhi said in a statement.

A little Googling shows me that the lawyers in Delhi tend to strike at the drop of a hat. They struck last August to protest a temporary suspension of two lawyers, struck again last February to protest a change in court procedure regarding adjournments, struck in April when miffed at the treatment of two lawyers at the hands of a bailiff, and struck once more in June to protest poor security at court. That covers page one of the Google results.

So there may be less to this dramatic-seeming action than meets the eye.

In other news, British mogul Guy Hands has become a taxpatriate.

The financier is now conducting all official business in his capacity as chairman of EMI, the music group, and Terra Firma from his Guernsey offices, where he moved earlier this year, flying senior executives over to the Channel Islands for key meetings.

He is understood to have sold his London house as part of his commitment not to return to the UK for some time over his unhappiness with rules that make UK citizens living abroad pay tax if they spend more than 90 days in the country.

“He has just taken a conservative view over the 90-day tax rule and decided to stay away, whether that’s for one year, two or three,” said one person close to Mr Hands. “Where he is in the world doesn’t make a great deal of difference.”

Mr Hands’ move to Guernsey was made in frustration at the Government’s decision to increase the top rate of income tax payments to 50pc from next year.

Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, recently told an interviewer why he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate:

Mother Jones: In 2006, you renounced your American citizenship to be a full-time Brit. Seems pretty extreme.

Terry Gilliam: Well, I don’t live there. I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America. The fact that Bush was there made it easier.

Mother Jones: Did you get any shit for your decision?

Terry Gilliam: Not really. It was very funny, ’cause you have to go down to the US Embassy and say, I want out, and then they counsel you and you go away for a month and think on it. And then you come back and they beg you to stay. Sorry!

Mother Jones: They counsel you? What do they say?

Terry Gilliam: Oh nothing, just, “We’re great friends! We love your work! Oh, don’t leave us!” Sorry!

Mother Jones: Is it true that they limit your movement?

Terry Gilliam: Oh yes, I’m on probation. I can’t be in America more than 30 days a year for 10 years.

Some items of note from the latest National Taxpayer Advocate’s Annual Report:

• The IRS has something called the Federal Payment Levy Program, which is designed to intercept payments coming from the federal government to people who have tax debts. According to this report, “the bulk of FPLP levy payments have historically been related to Social Security benefits.” At one point there was a hardship income threshold under which the government would not seize social security benefits to reclaim taxes, but the government phased this out and finally eliminated it at the beginning of 2006. The Taxpayer Advocate noted that this was further impoverishing some people on fixed-incomes who were already below the poverty line, and proposed a new filter. The IRS has agreed to implement a “low income filter” that “will exclude taxpayers from the FPLP if their estimated income (based on internal IRS data) is less than 250 percent of the poverty level.” This change is due to begin in 2011. The “internal IRS data” the report speaks of here it tries to explain in a footnote:

  To compute the taxpayer’s income, where the taxpayer has filed a tax return for the most recent year or two, the IRS will use the greater of the total positive income from that return, or income based on payor documents filed with IRS for that year. Where no such return was filed, the IRS will use payor documents for the most recent tax year. To determine family size, which is a component of the federal poverty level computation, the IRS will use the family unit size claimed on the taxpayer’s most recent return filed for the last two years, or if no such return is filed, the IRS will assume a family unit size of one.

  Although people with low-incomes may be saved from having their social security seized via FPLP in this way, the IRS may still use other collection techniques. For instance, they may seize the bank account your social security payment is deposited into, thus saving you from a partial levy only to hit you with a 100% seizure. Or they may file a “paper levy” to attach 100% of future social security payments until the unpaid tax is collected. For low-income tax resisters, this will require vigilance. Still, the Advocate predicts that this change “will protect hundreds of thousands of taxpayers from economic damage and unnecessary interaction with the IRS.”
• According to the Advocate, “many of the collection policies and practices in place today have little empirical justification even as they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 and result in unnecessary harm to taxpayers. For example, despite the fact that IRS levies and Notice of Federal Tax Lien filings increased by approximately 590 percent and 475 percent, respectively, between fiscal years 1999 and 2009 [see The Picket Line, 23 December 2009], overall inflation-adjusted collection revenue declined by approximately 7.4 percent over the same period.” The IRS appears to be systematically exaggerating the effectiveness of its collection efforts by attributing any revenue collected during the collection process, even things like subsequent tax refunds being automatically intercepted before they’re sent, as being attributable to the activities of collections personnel. Also, “[t]here is an astonishing lack of transparency as to what is included in the revenue figures and how they are computed.”
• The hardship standards that the IRS uses to determine whether a tax debt is collectible (that is, is there anything to seize, and will seizing it effectively throw the taxpayer onto government assistance, thus robbing Peter to pay Peter) don’t take into account things like credit card debt, school loans, and medical bills. In many cases, they’re trying to get blood from a stone.
• The IRS tends to file official lien notices haphazardly, without much regard for whether they are effective. Their policy seems to be: when an account reaches a certain threshold of unpaid balance, file a a notice of federal tax lien. This even though very little collection revenue comes from liens and though a lien notice like this can make it more difficult for delinquent taxpayers to get back on their feet financially. (These notices make the “secret lien” filed against all delinquent taxpayers part of the public record, available to potential creditors and employers and landlords and such, and put the lien into effect so that the IRS can skim money, for instance if the taxpayer sells property or has accounts receivable.)
• Taxpatriatism appears to be rife. According to the report, “[i]t is estimated that more than seven million American citizens reside abroad. Although U.S. citizens are required to file U.S. income tax returns regardless of their residency status, IRS data show that only 462,340 taxpayers (or 6.6 percent) filed returns from a foreign address in tax year 2007.”
• The “offer in compromise” program — in which people with large tax debts they can’t pay off can enter into an agreement with the government to pay a portion of their debt, comply fully with the tax laws for five years, and have the remainder of their debt forgiven — has become useless for most people. Now, in order to use this program, you have to pay a fee and submit a substantial down-payment along with your application (which involves “more than 100 steps in a 44-page package”) — and then your application may still be declined.
• Weirdly, the IRS processes our 1040 forms before it processes the W-2s and 1099s that substantiate the income we report. This makes it easy for fraudsters to understate their income and get refunds before the government knows anything is wrong.
• “The IRS is experiencing high levels of new individual taxpayer payment delinquencies in categories that could produce high levels of subsequent noncompliance.” Music to my ears.

In other news…

• The U.S. Treasury Department is required to publish a list of people who have renounced their United States citizenship. “[D]uring the quarter ending December 31, 2009[, a] total of 502 individuals expatriated. This is the highest quarterly number of individuals expatriating for many years. In fact, during that one quarter, there were more expatriations [than] in the combined previous seven quarters.” International Tax Blog speculates that this is because of a recent change in the law concerning tax treatment of expatriates. Until recently, even if you renounced your citizenship and moved to another country, the U.S. still wanted you to file tax returns for 10 more years, and would tax you on all of your income if you spent more than 30 days a year in-country. Now “moderately wealthy individuals can expatriate without any U.S. taxation… the 10 year tax filings are no longer necessary, making the expatriation a clean break from the U.S.”
• Karl, at Embracing Mystery, reports on the “Possibility Alliance” community in Northern Missouri, founded by Ethan & Sarah Hughes:

  Inspired by Gandhi’s whole-system approach to nonviolence, they are guided by five principles: simplicity, service, activism, inner work, and celebration.

  In terms of simplicity: they grow their own food (including everything from peaches and nuts to goat cheese) in permaculture food forests and they can food for the winter; they travel by foot, horse, bicycle, or public transportation (Ethan has been in a car less than 10 times in the last 10 years); they live electricity-free and computer-free, eating dinner by candle-light every night; they make their own music with guitars, a piano, and their own voices; and they tell stories by the wood stove at night. Some of their many forms of service and activism include: they live by the “gift economy,” sharing free food, free lodging, free permaculture courses and more; they helped start a bicycle cooperative in a local town; they advise people on natural building techniques; they are war-tax resisters; and one month a year Ethan leads a group of costumed “superheroes” on bicycle-powered spontaneous service adventures in various parts of the world. For inner work they regularly share readings from various spiritual traditions, study Nonviolent Communication, and support one another to live with open hearts and minds.

The Wall Street Journal has picked up on a story about taxpatriatism that I first wrote about about a month ago. Excerpts:

More Americans Sever U.S. Ties as IRS Gets Tougher

The number of American citizens and green-card holders severing their ties with the U.S. soared in the latter part of 2009, amid looming U.S. tax increases and a more aggressive posture by the Internal Revenue Service toward Americans living overseas.

An Ohio-born entrepreneur, now based in Switzerland, told Dow Jones he is considering turning in his U.S. passport. Mounting U.S. tax and reporting requirements are making potential business partners hesitate to do business with him, he said.

“I still do dearly love the U.S., and renouncing my citizenship is not something I take lightly. But more and more it is seeming like being part of a dysfunctional family,” said the businessman, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution.

“The tax itself is only a small part of the issue,” the Swiss-based entrepreneur said. “It’s the overall regulatory environment.”

A minority of the recent expatriates are U.S. natives who have started a new life overseas. Most are people with family ties outside the U.S.: foreign professionals who acquired a green card while working in the U.S., or people who have received higher education in the U.S.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago there was a big rush to make sure your kids became U.S. citizens, for access to U.S. schools for example,” said Timothy Burns, a tax lawyer at Withers law firm in Hong Kong. “Now we’re seeing just the opposite.”

While the Journal suggests that it is a tighter regulatory environment and the prospect of higher taxes that is causing the bump in taxpatriatism, International Tax Blog made what seemed to me to be a stronger case for the idea that a recent relaxing of regulations and less-onerous tax penalties for moderately wealthy taxpatriates was the real driving factor. I suspect the Journal article’s spin made it more palatable to the anti-regulatory and anti-tax editors who can now use it as a talking point on the editorial page.

An anonymous “former U.S. Citizen” has written an interesting booklet for Casey Research titled American Expatriation Guide: How to Divorce the U.S. Government.

Here are some excerpts that give a flavor of its very conscientious-tax-resister-friendly perspective:

I’m writing to you as a former U.S. citizen who was born and raised in America. I pledged allegiance to the flag every morning at school. I grew up and voted in elections. And I paid my taxes. Lots of them. I was what the government would consider a model citizen-asset: long revenue and short dissent. Most of my friends and relatives live in America, and I often go back to visit them. I still consider myself to be American, even though I am no longer bound to the U.S. government.

So why did I opt out of being a U.S. citizen? I realized a person’s family and cultural roots are not the same thing as affiliation with a political entity. My citizenship was an accident of birth, and I was pledging allegiance to the government before I even knew what the phrase meant. When I decided I no longer wanted to be a subject of the U.S. political machine, I exercised my right to expatriate. My ties to the government are what I severed, not my American roots or my relationships with the many friends and family I have in America.

Everybody has their own personal reasons for expatriating, but here are some of the benefits:

8) Freedom from the accountability for how the U.S. government spends your money.

I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex. Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment. The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.

If you step back and take an honest look, you’ll see that the unfortunate state of affairs in America has resulted from the reign of both political parties. Don’t fall for the divide-and-conquer strategy that politicians use to corral people into “red” and “blue” sports teams. Donkeys and elephants are sold as team mascots pretending to be in mortal conflict. In reality both parties work together to advance their agendas in lockstep… logrolling… and when necessary, one side “takes the hit” whenever the illusion of accountability is needed. The system depends on the delusion that people can “vote the bums out.”

Meanwhile, every government failure becomes the pretext for more government growth. If you don’t get distracted by the spectacle, it’s impossible not to notice the pattern: Every political solution to any problem involves more regulation of your life and more taking of your money.

What are the consequences of this vicious cycle of growth through failure? Most Americans are familiar with the oft-chanted phrase, “We’re #1!” Humor me for a minute and try this exercise. Mentally separate yourself from the government you’re paying trillions of dollars to fund. Then, consider that the U.S. is:

• #1 in government debt and deficits
• #1 in unfunded liabilities, most importantly Medicare and Social Security
• #1 in building and maintaining the biggest WMD stockpile in the world
• #1 in weapon sales to foreign governments
• #1 in bombs dropped and missiles fired on other nations
• #1 in causing civilian casualties and property destruction
• #1 in “defense” spending — about as much as all other countries combined
• #1 in lawyers per capita, with over 1.1 million total
• #1 in law-suits filed — millions and millions every year
• #1 in political lobbyists, special interest groups, and campaign donations
• #1 in taxpayer bailouts of the politically connected “too big to fail” corporations
• #1 in people imprisoned — “The United States has 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.” ―Wikipedia

I’ve avoided citing sources for these claims (save the last one) because I’m hoping you’ll be moved to verify them for yourself. The process is eye-opening. If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals. How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought? There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know. These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine. Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?

Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy. One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster. You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.

9) Freedom to radically increase your charitable giving.

Individual liberty sparks our charitable instincts. If you care deeply about philanthropy, expatriation frees up vastly more of your capital to give away. Also, your philanthropic impulses are no longer distorted by the IRS. You can give to any charitable cause worldwide without being penalized if it’s not anointed as a tax-deductible entity.

The human impulse to help another in need is older than any government. Your judgment about how to contribute your capital to best help others will forever be superior to that of bureaucrats. Expatriation opens up new possibilities for you to reach out and help others in need.

The (free) guide goes on to give an overview of the process of renouncing U.S. citizenship (despite its title, the guide focuses on this more than on mere “expatriation”).

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the guide to expatriation and renunciation of U.S. citizenship that I linked to a few days back. And the Interwebs seem to be sharing my interest, at least judging from the links that have been passing through my feed reader lately. Here are a few:

• Here’s an excerpt from that guide: Ten Benefits of Expatriation.
• Disrespect for Government Is as American as Fried Bananas — Felipe Franco says that despite Americans’ pretensions to a revolutionary heritage of limitations on government and suspicion of rulers, the U.S. has a bigger, more intrusive, and less-questioned government than most of the rest of the Americas (something Franco keenly feels, with “a painful twinge,” whenever he returns to the U.S. from south of the border).

  But see this response from Jorge at Sunni and the Conspirators.

• The Wall Street Journal calls Americans abroad Toxic Citizens and explains why their government makes it hard for them to have normal financial lives overseas, and how this is causing some to look into renouncing their citizenship.
• “P.T. Freeman” tells why he renounced his citizenship in part because of U.S. restrictions on visiting Cuba (part 2, part 3).
• Fred Reed is a favorite ornery expatriate writer. Here are some highlights from his work:
  • Not All Rumors Correct — “What’s it really like in Mexico, Fred?”
  • Just Rambling (and Not a Law Firm in Sight)
  • The Road to Margaritaville — my nickel guide for people thinking about expatriation to Mexico
  • Living in a Free Country — it would all be illegal in the U.S. — the beer, the fireworks, the free-lance skyrockets, a religious festival, and especially having a good time.

In not entirely unrelated news, I’m going on another south-of-the-border vacation next month, so expect lighter posting hereabouts in July.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• One thing I didn’t mention in my earlier linkdump about expatriatism and renunciation of citizenship as a tax resistance strategy, is that the U.S. government has an “exit tax” that it applies to people who renounce their citizenship. William Thomas Worster of The Hague University has written a paper for Florida Tax Review arguing that this tax is unconstitutional.
• Another brief note about the war tax resistance movement in Spain, this time from the Antimilitarist Assembly of Gran Canaria (one of the Canary Islands). Complaining of Spanish arms sales to Morocco and of the government’s use of the economic crisis to force cuts in social spending (while military spending is “the only thing that has not been cut”), and eager not to be complicit in military spending, the assembly called for war tax resistance.
• Circle of 13 turned me on to Joan Baez’s rendition of the song “Copper Kettle” — an anthem for whiskey rebels and moonshiners.
• Mark your calendars for the November, 2010 NWTRCC national gathering in Boston, Massachusetts. This one looks to be particularly good, as it will be held in conjunction with the 25^th Annual New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters.

And now we’re off for a few weeks in Mexico. I’ve got a few pages of archival material pre-written and I may stumble in to an internet cafe from time to time and slap them up on-site, but other than that you shouldn’t expect to see much here until August.

A few more things that I found in the inbox when I got back to my desk:

• Evan Reeves has decided to become a war tax resister, and he’s blogging about it. One of his innovations: “to make repayment to the IRS by sending a hand-written check for every cent owed with the name of a fallen soldier in the memo.… that would bring us to 5,563 names (hence 5,563 checks). If I’m going to repay it, they’re sure as, hell going to have to go to great lengths to get their money.”
• “A Quebec man, fed up with his skyrocketing property taxes, carted more than 200,000 pennies down to City Hall to pay his bill.”
• Financial Times has now caught on to the trend: Americans Forfeit Citizenship to Avoid Tax.
• Revenue to the U.S. government from excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and ammunition is sharply up. This is largely from higher tax rates on tobacco, firearms, and ammunition, but also possibly from a surge in firearms & ammunition purchases in the wake of national Democratic election victories which caused some people to anticipate stricter gun control would be on the way.
• I haven’t had time to go over this in detail, but a new paper from professor Nancy Staudt looks at how the U.S. judiciary uses its power to raise funds for the military during wartime — a responsibility nominally reserved for the legislative branch.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• NWTRCC is maintaining a list of war tax resistance actions coming up around Tax Day (April 18^th) this year across the United States. Check back from time to time to see what’s going on in your neck of the woods, or let them know if you’re planning something good.
• The War Resisters League has revised their popular “pie chart” graph that purports to show the destiny of the federal discretionary budget and thereby the destiny of your federal income tax dollar. This year, because Obama’s budget called for a reduction in the payroll tax rate with the missing money to come explicitly out of that raised by the income tax in the general fund, the chart’s conceit of keeping trust funds and the taxes ostensibly destined for them separate from the rest of the accounts is even more awkward than usual. Still, the fliers make for good conversation-starters.
• The number of people who expatriated from the United States and renounced their U.S. citizenship jumped last year, more than doubling the number in the previous year.
• Want to know the various methods people use to evade and resist the various taxes on tobacco? Your government has published a helpful report on the subject.

Robert Wood, in a blog he writes for Forbes, takes a look at the history and current state of U.S. law regarding “taxpatriatism” — people who renounce their U.S. citizenship and move overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

A couple of things of note:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC has written up some of her notes on the “Innovative Social Justice Networking Techniques” panel with Mira Luna and Kwan Booth from the NWTRCC national gathering earlier this month.
• Phil Hodgen, from International Tax Law specialists the Hodgen Law Group, ponders the question what if one spouse is renouncing U.S. citizenship and the other isn’t? How do you fill out Form 8854 to figure out whether you are a “covered expatriate” who has to pay a hefty exit tax?

The number of people who are renouncing their U.S. citizenship or giving up on their long-term residency continues to rise, extending a trend that began last year.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Now’s a good time to sign up for the Fall 2011 NWTRCC National Gathering in Kansas City this November.
• The Tax Update Blog notes the rise in the number of Americans who are expatriating and renouncing citizenship. Joe Kristan attributes this to new government regulations requiring Americans who live and work overseas to report the details of their bank accounts to the IRS or face draconian fines.
• Robert Burrowes gives an update on the state of war tax resistance in Australia.

  War tax resistance in Australia is difficult not only because few people have the required level of commitment but also because of the government’s high level of control over tax payments (employers are required to deduct tax from income before the employee gets it and this is done in such a way that most employees get a refund after submitting their annual tax return).

  …the ATO has already used most of its powers against me: seizing my bank account (1984), garnisheeing wages (twice), bankruptcy (1991, effectively for life because I will not cooperate), a contempt of court conviction for refusing to cooperate with the bankruptcy trustee (1992) and seizure of my passport (1993).

  Burrows is now working on something called The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World which is due to launch this Armistice Day.
• NWTRCC has released a brief outreach flier about Anarchists and War Tax Resistance that tries to show how war tax resistance as a tactic fits in to anarchist activism.
• Some grist for the progressive mill: The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and Don’t Tax the Rich, Smash Their Privilege
• June Farrow, a 72-year-old from England, is resisting her council tax — or most of it anyway — on the grounds that she simply can’t afford it. “It didn’t bother me going to court because I feel that somebody’s got to speak up for all pensioners who often cannot speak up for themselves. They’ll probably send the bailiffs in, but I haven’t got anything in this house that’s worth anything. I’ve sold everything off to help me stay in my home, unless they’d like to take the dog — she’s the only valuable thing I’ve got.… They’ve told me that if I spend my savings — another £3,000 — I will get benefits. I don’t want benefits. I’m an independent person and I like to try and look after myself. Hundreds of pensioners are in the same position as me and the law has got to be changed.” Here’s another, more detailed article about the Farrow case.

Speaking of council tax resisters, here’s another one, from last year:

Courier refused to pay council tax while travellers camped at layby

Protester could have bank account frozen

A north-east man who staged a council-tax protest against travellers camped illegally near his home has been told his bank account could be frozen and his property seized.

Billy Thomson told Aberdeenshire Council he would not pay his council tax while travellers were camped in a layby at Garlogie.

Now, the authority has called in sheriff officers, who have threatened to freeze the self-employed courier’s bank account and seize property from his home in an attempt to force him to pay the £700 bill.

The 59-year-old first took a stand against the authority when caravans were parked in the layby on the B9119 Aberdeen to Echt road for nearly a year in 2005.

When the travellers left he began paying his council tax again, but stopped in 2008 when travellers camped there for about four months.

The layby has since been shut to prevent travellers from returning.

Mr Thomson, of Garlogie Cottages, said he respected travellers’ rights, but criticised the council for “persecuting me, but not them”.

He said: “While the travellers were parked there no one could use the layby, and it had been a well-used service.

“I decided that from then on, when these people are parked there without paying council tax, neither would I.

“I know a lot of travellers — they are decent people and I respect their choice of lifestyle, but Aberdeenshire Council has shown double standards.”

Mr Thomson said he first received notice that Aberdeenshire Council was seeking the unpaid tax when he received a letter from the authority earlier this year.

He said he took the letter to the council’s Inverurie office seeking an explanation as to why the authority was seeking payment from him but not the travellers, but “never got a straight answer”.

“I cannot see any difference between me not paying my council tax and the travellers not paying it,” he said.

A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council said: “We take the recovery of council tax very seriously and we continue to make efforts to collect tax which has not been paid.”

For those of you who don’t speak English as the English do, “travellers” I think refers to either vagrants, gypsies, or Irish Travellers; while a “lay-by” is something like a highway rest stop.

Here’s another example:

Protest at bumpy road danger zone

A former landlady who claims her life is being made a “misery” by unfinished speed bumps is making a council tax protest.

June Robinson has canceled her council tax direct debit in a bid to make council bosses listen to her pleas for help.

The 62-year-old is kept awake by traffic bumping over four unfinished speed ramps at the junction of Beach Road and Beach Avenue in Cleveleys.

She said: “It’s made my life a misery. It’s been going on 10 weeks — bang, bump everyday. I wake up at 5am with the bangs. I’ve got a crack in my bedroom because of the vibrations.…”

These all have in common a mode of tax resistance that’s relatively rare in the United States — refusing to pay a tax because the government is charging too much or providing too little in return, as though the government were a subscription you could cancel when you decided it wasn’t worth the cost (would that it were).

You may have heard the news that Facebook co-founder and therefore stunningly wealthy fellow Eduardo Saverin celebrated the upcoming initial public offering of Facebook stock by renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

As far as I know, he has not made a public statement about his decision, but it’s pretty easy to guess there is a tax angle. The IRS will demand a pretty huge exit tax from Saverin, so this is no get out of jail free card, but if he’s covered his bases well and Facebook continues to be the big lucrative internet property it is today, he’ll have done wisely by getting out of U.S. clutches.

The news has prompted another flock of commentaries on the growing number of U.S. citizens who live overseas who are renouncing citizenship, largely to escape U.S. taxes and increasingly invasive and onerous paperwork requirements.

The Wall Street Journal has a good overview of the pluses and minuses of renouncing U.S. citizenship for tax or other reasons.

Current tax resisters take note: in order to renounce your citizenship…

You will have to certify that you have been tax-compliant for the last five years. The upshot: Expatriation is a bad strategy for coping with past noncompliance.

One tactic tax resisters have used from time to time is to pack up and leave when the tax collector comes calling. Here are some examples:

• Around the time of the Dharsana salt raids in Gandhi’s independence campaign in India, the government there was also stymied by mass migrations. Here are some news accounts from the period:

  Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands. The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of the year.

  The evaders lock their doors and flee when tax collectors appear or hide in the fields, so attachment was resorted to.

  The anti-tax campaign which it was said would replace the campaign against the salt laws already has been initiated in the Bardoli district where officials are arriving to post signs warning the peasants that their lands will be forfeit if they refuse to pay the dues. Thus far they have found the villages deserted.

  All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli region [population ~88,000] have left their homes resolved not to pay land taxes until swaraj, or home-rule is established. Many left their household goods, chattels, crops behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off. [Though another account said “The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle. It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.”]

  The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No swaraj, no revenue.” The leaders of the movement declare the peasants do not desire to evade payment, but simply will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.

  The congress characterizes the peasants’ actions as “an unrivaled example of a migration movement on the part of the people who are resolved to forfeit their all in the interest of the Gandhi cause.”

• There is a movement of sorts nowadays that goes by the initials “P.T.” — often said to stand for “permanent tourist,” but also “prior taxpayer,” and a handful of others. One advocate explained:

  In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist. A person who is just “Passing Through.” The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.

• Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, told an interviewer he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate: “I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America. The fact that Bush was [in office] there made it easier.”



• Jeff Knaebel left his life as an American entrepreneur to become a stateless mendicant in India in order to stop paying for American military adventures:

  Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life. I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.” It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.

  I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever. I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children. No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.

  I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State. I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body. By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood. I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love. I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.

• When the tax inspector came to town during the Poujadist uprising in France in 1955, there might be nothing left to inspect — the business district having been abandoned in anticipation of the inspector’s arrival. One account put it this way:

  The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…

• Leaving the United States for tax reasons seems to be a growing trend. One “taxpatriate” wrote:

  I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex. Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment. The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.

  If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals. How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought? There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know. These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine. Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?

  Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy. One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster. You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.

• In Sierra Leone in 1898, collectors of a new imperial government “hut tax” found fewer huts than they expected:

  The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts. In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in January last many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees.

• The tax collectors in Mytilene, Turkey, were so rapacious that much of the rural Greek population there abandoned their farms and “emigrated to the towns and cities in the hopes of subsisting on private charity” in early 1905 rather than risk losing their farms to the tax collector before harvest time. This passive resistance was the precursor to a more active tax resistance campaign that swept Turkey starting in early 1906.

And here is an example from the Boston Evening Transcript on this date in 1897:

Remarkable Tax Controversy.

J.F. Hathaway of Somerville Says He Will Move Rather Than Pay Tax Assessed.

A long-standing controversy between James F. Hathaway of Somerville, president of the Sprague & Hathaway Company, engaged in the manufacture of portraits, and the board of assessors of that city has culminated in a statement by Mr. Hathaway regarding his attitude in the matter. It seems that in the spring of 1896 the principal assessors taxed Mr. Hathaway for corporation stock which he was supposed to own. Mr. Hathaway and business friends made strong efforts to induce the assessors to abate the tax. Acting upon the advice of the city solicitor, the board refused an abatement, and turned the bill over to the city collector for collection. Mr. Hathaway says he will remove the plant from Somerville if the collector forces payment. It appears from the statement he has given to the press that he made the same threat in 1891, and that on April 29, 1892, he packed up his furniture and prepared a move from the city rather than pay a tax. Why he did not carry out his intention he explains as follows:

“While my household goods were being loaded on a wagon in order to get them out of Somerville before the first day of May, I received a message to come to the City Hall at once on important business. When this message came over the telephone the wagon had not been at my house more than fifteen minutes. Evidently they had someone watching my movements; they did not think I intended to move out of the city. I went down to City Hall and fond the full board of assessors there, the city solicitor, the mayor and several others, who were probably never there at that time in the morning except by appointment. When I arrived, they asked me what I wanted, and I said: ‘Gentlemen, this is a nice time to ask me what I want.’ They proposed that I should pay one-half the tax, which I refused to do. Then they proposed that I pay one-third of the tax. I said: ‘Gentlemen, I will never pay one cent of it; if any part of it is just, it is all just.’

“They were all very anxious to find some way out of the difficulty and keep me in Somerville. The city solicitor told them then and there they had no right to abate the tax; it had been legally assessed, and there was no legal way out of it. But in a very few minutes they told me they would drop it; they were anxious that nothing more be said about it, and desired to let the matter drop out of sight as quietly as possible; they said they would never force the collection of the tax. The day this matter of the tax of 1891 was settled the chairman of the board of assessors brought me home in his private carriage. On the way, he said: ‘Mr. Hathaway, I am very sorry this ever occurred, and I am glad to find some way out of it.’ I asked him how about the future, and told him that if this thing was to be repeated next year or at any future time, my goods were all on the wagon then, and I might just as well get out of Somerville immediately. He said: ‘This taxing of foreign corporations never has come up before, and probably never will again. I assure you that so long as I have anything to do with the assessing of the taxes in this city you will never hear from it.’ ”

Hathaway went to jail in 1897 for refusing to pay the tax, but emerged victorious, as the Somerville Board of Aldermen voted to rescind his taxes. “He had threatened to take his business out of Somerville if this was not done,” a news account says.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Here’s some more good stuff about the guerrilla electricians in the Greek Δεν Πληρώνω (“Won’t Pay”) movement who reconnect the power to people who have had their electricity cut off for failure to pay the new taxes. The article claims that the movement has successfully, and quite illegally, relit a thousand Greek homes in this way.
• A Huffington Post columnist covers Americans who are renouncing their citizenships to get out from under the IRS.
• Francisco José Sarrión Torres reports on the activities of the Tax Resistance Group of Ciudad Real [Spain]: “This year we wrapped up the war tax resistance campaign with no refunds redirected to two-thirds of the tax resisters in Ciudad Real. It has been reclaimed as though it were an error, but we have already stated publicly and in writing that it was not, but was an exercise of conscientious objection in the face of the misuse of our taxes by the government. We have redirected €870 to organizations like Ecologists in Action of Ciudad Real, the 0.7% Project of the Rural Christian Movement, the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation, or Doctors Without Borders, from believing that these are some that actually contribute to progressing toward a peaceful world.”
• Carlos Lopez has an article on tax resistance up at the Euribor blog. Some excerpts, translated from Spanish:

  …there are reasons to protest, most of us understand that the national books have been cooked and since we are shackled with deep debt, the most workable, quick, and “EU-recommended” solution is budget cuts, to be prioritized in terms of their expendability — and it is here that most of us feel betrayed, by seeing how expendable the citizens are and how comparatively vital are the political class, who have barely changed their privileges.

  Lopez has decided to become a “social rat” — reducing his consumption as much as possible so as to avoid paying the value-added tax:

  …I declare a consumer strike, and I will get the most out of every cent I earn; I subscribe to “lonchafinismo” (responsible consumption). I’ll stretch out the time on my monthly contact lenses, I’ll cut my hair less, I’ll give up on going to the movies and watch films at home, I’ll stretch expiration dates, will drive more economically. Certainly the shops are not to blame, and I’m sorry for them, but if the government comes to realize that it [the VAT increase] is a useless measure, perhaps they will rethink it.

  He also recommends a few other methods of tax resistance. There were over a hundred comments on the article last I looked, many of them off-topic in the classic internet fashion, but giving some clue as to the reach of the article.

The first edition of the Friends Journal is dated 2 July 1955, and billed itself as “Successor to The Friend (1827–1955) and Friends Intelligencer (1844–1955).”

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which had been split into an Orthodox and a Hicksite meeting since 1827, had reunified earlier in 1955. The new magazine reflected this merger: The Friend had been the organ of the Orthodox meeting, and the Intelligencer that of the Hicksite meeting.

From 1955 to 1974, the magazine shared offices with the “Friends Peace Committee” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which may have led to some cross-pollination, and increased coverage for peace testimony concerns in the magazine.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in the 1950s

There are few mentions of war tax resistance in the early issues of Friends Journal. We have reached the last years of the long decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that began around the time of the American Civil War.

In 1955, the American Friends Service Committee put out an influential booklet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, that mentions war tax resistance only once, in reference to its use by Quakers in the mid-18^th century (this despite the fact that war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer were part of the committee that wrote the booklet).

The first mention I found comes from the 3 March 1956 issue. It is a single-sentence sardonic comment on the tax resistance of conservative Utah governor J. Bracken Lee: “The Governor of Utah should be welcomed to the ranks of conscientious objectors, even though most Friends and other pacifists would not resist paying income tax on the ground that they were conscientiously opposed to economic aid to other countries.”

The the 12 January 1957 issue mentions a lawsuit filed by Milton Mayer “to recover income tax taken from him forcibly in what he claims was a violation of his conscientious objection to war.” The three-paragraph article is conspicuous for how much effort it seems to go to to avoid referring to Mayer as a Quaker. Mayer is “a well-known writer,” a “Carmel, Calif., author, formerly a Chicagoan,” “who writes for leading magazines,” and “has been a lecturer for the American Friends Service Committee and at many colleges, universities and churches,” and “has been a member of the faculties of the University of Chicago and Frankfurt (Germany) and is consultant to the Great Books Foundation.” All that resume material in the brief article, and yet no mention that he is a Quaker convert. The article says that “his religious principles will not let him buy guns for other men to shoot” but doesn’t call these Quaker principles or refer to the Quaker peace testimony. So it makes for a curious article: a respectful nod at war tax resistance with a pained effort to distance the Society of Friends from it.

The 16 February 1957 issue included a “symposium” on “Investments and Our Peace Testimony” which highlighted the difficulty of finding investments “free of the taint of involvement in war preparation.” Only one of the participants, Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., explicitly mentions taxation as something that triggers the same concern. Excerpts:

The problem has worried me ever since World War Ⅰ. At that time, at the risk of losing a position and the chance of becoming permanently barred from my chosen profession (the investment business), I refused to sell or otherwise handle U.S. Liberty Bonds. My firm respected my conscientious convictions, however, and the ax did not fall.

Since then I have scrutinized the activities of the corporations whose securities I have considered selling to my clients and have rejected many because of their service in military production. Yet I still think there is no satisfactory solution of the problem for most of us. We live in a world geared to military activities. I see no way of escaping it except by the destruction of militarism itself and by adjudicating differences which might lead to war.

Investments are only a small fraction of the over-all problem. Payment of taxes is another important aspect of the situation.

It is true that to some extent mortgages could be considered, but, of course, income taxes would have to be paid from the interest.…

The 11 April 1959 issue included an interesting note about the Quaker outpost of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in the form of a letter from one of the inhabitants there. Excerpts:

You are so surprised that our group consists of so many North Americans. The reason that most of them have established themselves in Costa Rica is not the climate, nor the possibility of finding work here, but rather an idealistic reason, typical of Quakers. They were convinced that it was against their conscience to continue living in a country where, indirectly, they had to collaborate in arming the nation for war by means of taxation, and where it is impossible to educate their children according to principles of Quakers. A few of them spent a year in prison for being conscientious objectors before emigration to Costa Rica.

So finally, a full-throated reference to real live Quakers who have taken action in response to their conscientious objection to paying war taxes. Perhaps their geographical remove made this feel safer to mention. Or perhaps the ice that had formed over American Quaker war tax resistance was beginning to crack. The 25 April 1959 issue covered the goings-on at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting earlier that year. On the last day of that Meeting, according to the article, war tax resistance was discussed:

It will always be unfinished business that Friends’ practice of our testimonies is not consistent with profession. The discussion centered on the payment of income tax, particularly that portion used for military purposes. Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay. Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes. Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.

The next mention comes from the 25 July 1959 issue, and shows the cracked ice has begun to melt. Excerpt:

Meetings [on the West Coast] in general have been reconsidering the meaning of the peace witness. Newer activities have included… street distribution of a leaflet on tax refusal because of the amount going to arms (write Franklin Zahn, 836 South Hamilton Boulevard, Pomona, California, for samples), and a poster walk in front of the federal tax office on income tax day, April 15…

Franklin Zahn’s name will come up frequently during the years of the thaw and resurgence of war tax resistance in the American Society of Friends.

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:

Cursing the IRS

Internal Revenue Service agents found an unwelcome surprise — and a possible witchcraft curse — on Friday when unknown individuals left a trio of charred, headless chickens outside the agency’s McAllen offices.

War tax protest

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 15^th 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 2007, 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.

Arthur Silber

Arthur Silber, of the blog Once Upon a Time…, shared the story of an IRS levy on his PayPal account. Excerpts:

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 the 2011 tax year. 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.

Sequester? Why, I hardly know her!

A Washington Post article about the terrible sequester begins:

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.

Since the beginning of the year, 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.

But the latest report broke the record again — substantially — with 1,130 Americans saying “goodbye and good riddance.”

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.

Peace Tax Fund

Peter J. Reilly, at his Forbes blog, takes a look at the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.

Jerry Kirk

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:

What “sales tax holidays” reveal

Some American states that use a sales tax to raise revenue also periodically have “sales tax holidays” as a fiscally silly cheap ploy for the sympathies of the chamber of commerce set — often holding these holidays in late Summer when parents are doing their back-to-school shopping. Michael Graham looked at the psychology behind these holidays, and suspects they reveal a simmering resentment of government:

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.

Next weekend, 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.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Earlier this year I went through all the back issues of Friends Journal to review how the practice of Quaker war tax resistance underwent a revival and then retreated again in the last half century or so. We’re at the bottom of the retreat trough today. There has been almost nothing about war tax resistance in the Journal this year. The latest issue does have some mentions, but they’re pretty much all in the obituaries:
  • The obituary notice for Mary Caroline Mendenhall notes that she was part of the Fairhope single-tax corporation — a “cooperative community that hoped to address the challenges to conscience that came through the payment of taxes” — and that she was one of those Quakers who emigrated to the Monteverde settlement in Costa Rica after she “became uncomfortable with the draft and with paying taxes that contributed to militarism.”
  • The obituary notice for Edward Webster says that he and his wife Susan “stopped paying war taxes for a period [in 1967], started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund as a place for war tax resisters to redirect a portion of their taxes to, and counter-recruited at high schools.”
• Spanish war tax resister Paco Ortega has joined up with the Stop Evictions group from Granada’s 15M assembly and has expanded his war tax resistance so that now he also refuses to pay the portion of his taxes devoted to the state police and national guard, legislature, monarchy, prison, election and party financing, and interest on the debt — a bit over 31% of his tax bill. He’s redirecting the resisted portion of his taxes to the Stop Evictions project.
• IRS ineptitude is an evergreen news item. The latest example includes such fun facts as “the IRS sent at least 343 potentially fraudulent tax returns in 2011 to the same, single address in Shanghai, China, for a total of $156,533 in tax refunds” — “655 potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling $220,489 were sent to the same address in Kaunas, Lithuania.”
• They’re not getting any help from Congress. The government estimates that as a result of the recent shutdown histrionics, “the IRS was unable to collect about $1-billion per week from its enforcement activities. In addition to delaying the start of the 2014 tax-filing season by up to two weeks, the shutdown will cost the federal government billions of dollars in interest on late IRS refunds and late payments to federal contractors…”
• The government of Thailand was contemplating a law that would have granted amnesty to politicians who had perpetrated a variety of crimes over the past decade. The opposition called for general strikes and tax resistance, and the government abandoned the amnesty plan.
• “This year will set a record for expatriations by U.S. taxpayers, with at least a 33% increase from the previous high in 2011.” The latest big name giving the kiss off to the sweet land of liberty? Tina Turner.
• I’ve been reading a lot about tollgate and traffic camera destruction by the bonnets rouges of Bretaigne lately. Here’s an example of a somewhat more light-hearted protest: temporarily disabling such cameras by wrapping them in plastic, painting a happy face on them, and topping them with a bonnet rouge.
• In Greece, the toll resisters depended less on destruction and more on mass action — mobbing the toll booths, lifting the gates, and waving the drivers through. Some of these activists are being prosecuted now (with mixed success). But yet more infuriating? The country’s legislature has voted itself a new benefits package, and among those benefits: legislators don’t have to pay highway tolls!

In other news, the number of U.S. citizens who renounced their citizenship rose to an all-time high last year — 2,999 people.

It is widely assumed that the cause of this is not shame at being an American citizen, but annoyance at the increasingly invasive tax laws that require even American citizens who live overseas and have not been to the United States in years to reveal all about their financial lives every year to the IRS.

I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my screen in recent weeks:

War Tax Resistance News

• Erica Weiland penned a thoughtful piece on War Tax Resistance as Self-Care at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.

• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is right around tax day (April 15) again this year, and the coalition is making plans for a variety of protest actions.

U.S. Tax Law News

• If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the U.S., you’re supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J. Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor” though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid SE/payroll taxes entirely.”
• NPR looked into Why More Americans Are Renouncing U.S. Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes, and how the U.S. tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.

Tax Resistance in Spain

• Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes. Excerpts:

  Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes, created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the particracy of lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.

  It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the exclusive benefit of the people.

• Meanwhile the number of towns in Catalonia that have stopped paying their taxes to the federal government, sending them to the regional government instead has risen to 54. This is currently only a sort of quasi-tax-resistance, as the regional government dutifully forwards these taxes to the central government, but it is part of a strategy of strengthening the regional tax agency in anticipation of eventually making the buck stop there in “the transition to statehood.”

Tax Resistance in France

• Yes, they’re still burning “ecotax” portals in Brittany. The latest one was partially burned on the night of the 5^th, which damaged it enough that the authorities ordered it to be removed.

A Look Back at the Poll Tax Resistance Campaign

• Chris Robinson has published a series of reminiscences of the campaign against the poll tax that brought down Thatcher’s reign in Great Britain:
  1. The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign
  2. A Paler Shade of Red
  3. Get Militant
  4. Revolution Down Below
  5. The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
  6. The Art of Self-Defence
  7. Demo
  8. Victory
• I also found some archives about the poll tax resistance effort at an Anarchist Communist Federation website.

Tax Resistance in Greece

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement won’t quit either. Thousands of Greeks marched at Afidnes and raised the toll gates there last month.

Tax Resistance in the Dominican Republic

• I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to support a business strike in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.

Tax Resistance in Argentina

• Last month, twenty “productores, industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly: “manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads. The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their businesses impossible to operate.

Tax Resistance in Great Britain

• “A mother of three is so incensed by the Isle of Man’s new sewerage charge she has pledged to go to prison rather than pay it.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Venetian separatists are soon due to announce how many people and businesses have signed on to their tax strike and meanwhile have posted a twenty-question FAQ about the practical measures tax resisters should take.
• The number of Americans who are renouncing their citizenship (for tax reasons) continues to rise.
• Apparently the “bedroom tax” is on its way out in Scotland. The “tax” — actually a cut in government housing subsidies for people living in homes with more bedrooms than the government considers necessary for the family size — was widely protested.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund has sent out its Summer 2014 appeal. They’re aiming to bring in $6,341 from fund subscribers to reimburse three war tax resisters who have lost penalties and interest in addition to the amounts they had refused to pay. Subscribers are being asked to pay $30 each towards this amount. In its last appeal, sent out in April, the fund successfully raised $8,170 of the $10,410 it sought (this roughly 80% success rate is pretty typical of the fund — some subscribers move and can’t be reached, and others drop the ball, but most come through).
• The number of Americans who are taxpatriating — abandoning their U.S. citizenship or residency status in order to get out from under the thumb of the IRS — continues to rise.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The number of tax enforcement personnel working for the IRS is dropping to the lowest level since the 1970s.
• With only two weeks’ notice, the U.S. State Department announced that its fee for processing an application for Renunciation of U.S. Citizenship is jumping from $450 to $2,350. I guess somebody was starting to get embarrassed at the record number of American citizens saying “to hell with it.”
• The New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters will be held October 3^rd–5^th in Kennebunk, Maine.
• George Brandes, vice president for health care programs at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, told a reporter he believes that more than a third of U.S. Taxpayers will owe money on their income tax returns next year for overpayments of insurance subsidies.
• The IRS levied James Waterman’s bank account, but Waterman got tipped off about it and got to the bank two hours later to clean out one of his accounts. The IRS says that makes the bank liable for what they let him withdraw while the levy was in effect.
• Erica Weiland shares her story of running a war tax resistance information booth at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair.
• The War Resisters League Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns is now available on-line.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

War Tax Resistance

• Erica Weiland notes that while there may not be an ongoing military draft conscripting soldiers in the U.S., if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you have already been drafted.
• Peg Morton writes of the opportunity she had to help the war tax resistance of John Lindsay-Poland through her participation in the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an interview with long-time anti-nuclear activist Frances Crowe. In that interview, she touches on her war tax resistance:

  I no longer pay federal taxes, but I do file. I set up a trust, and put everything in my children’s names, so I own nothing. But the government does take money out of my social security, and I donate a sum equivalent to my federal taxes to charity.

  So, I try to put a third of my “tax money” into repairing the damages of war — I’ve been helping a woman go to school in Afghanistan, and I gave a thousand dollars for her to pay for tuition this year. I do things like that, and help this cancer clinic in Iraq. And a third goes to peace centers in this country. It costs me money, but it’s worth it for my conscience.

• American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak explains how he came to take his stand, and how his Meeting supported him when he went to jail for it:

• Henry Braun, a poet and Vietnam-era war tax resister, died recently. “In the 1960s, he organized poetry readings against the Vietnam war and participated in the War Tax Resistance movement. He was convicted of tax evasion because he chose to give a portion of his taxes to the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital and to the city’s public schools.”
• War tax resisters who hope to get some legal blessing for their stand have traditionally appealed either to the legislature (by lobbying for something like a “peace tax fund” bill), or to the courts (by trying to get conscientious objection to military taxation recognized as a protected right). But Leigh Osofsky, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami, reminds us that the executive branch, too, has discretion in how it enforces the tax law — refusing to enforce some parts of it and enforcing other parts of it in selective or spotty ways.

Other Links of Interest

• Colin Donoghue’s meditation on “The Root Injustice, & A Real Way Forward to a Sustainable Society” tries to unravel the tangle that happens when people try to promote progressive ends by means of an inherently inegalitarian, coercive, privilege-entrenching institution like government.
• The latest numbers suggest that a record number of people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in 2014.
• After a New York Times exposé about the IRS’s use of civil forfeiture to seize money from innocent people, the agency released a statement announcing that it would be reforming its use of the practice.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Remember that Litopia After Dark podcast I was on a few days back? Co-host Peter Cox tried to spark some controversy by calling war tax resistance an “elitist” stand. I wasn’t quite sure what he was going on about, but I think he was implying that it’s elitist to prioritize your own ethical limits on how you want your money spent over the government’s determination of where it thinks people’s money should be spent (particularly, perhaps, when the government has some degree of democratic legitimacy). Erica Weiland responds at War Tax Talk to the question: “Is War Tax Resistance Elitist?” …and wonders if some people are afraid of becoming better people because they don’t want others to think of them as “holier than thou.”
• Have you got any protest plans this coming Tax Day? If so, NWTRCC wants to know about it. They compile a list of such actions for their annual Tax Day press release, which can help you get a little more buzz.
• In a fairly repulsive bit of political theater, Congress is raking the IRS over the coals for its use of civil forfeiture to seize money from people without convicting them — or even charging them — with a crime. What makes this repulsive is that it’s Congress that designed the civil forfeiture authorization, fully intending that it be abused in this way. It’s entirely in their power to pass a less-unjust law, but they chose to pass a more-unjust one instead… and now they pretend to be champions of civil liberties, pontificating about how unfair the IRS is being by using the law as it was designed.
• When I was in Colombia two years ago I learned a bundle about the struggles of conscientious objectors to military service there. I was happy to hear recently that the Constitutional Court there has made a decisive ruling meant to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. The Colombian military is almost an independent branch of government in Colombia, and hasn’t shown much respect for the law in the past, and so it may drag its heels over submitting to the court’s ruling. But activists there are hailing this as an important step, and it was certainly the product of a lot of hard and patient work on their part.
• Scott London, Sheriff of Eddy County, New Mexico, intervened to stop the IRS and federal marshals from seizing property of county resident Kent Carter. Carter has refused to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars the IRS says he owes; Carter, apparently under the influence of the “show me the law” school of tax protesters, denies he owes anything.
• I’ve never been a fan of Al Sharpton, but I may have to change my mind. According to a report at National Review Online, “Every Sharpton business known has been dissolved for failure to comply with tax rules” and Sharpton “also personally owes New York State nearly $596,000, according to active tax warrants.”
• Sure enough, last year a record number of Americans renounced their citizenship or dropped their residency status.

Today, a roundup of links from here and there:

American War Tax Resisters

• Ruth Benn reports on war tax resister presence at the protests surrounding the United Nations review of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• Here are some photos from NWTRCC’s national gathering in Milwaukee earlier this month. Erica Weiland wrote up a recap of the gathering.
• On the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor gave a nod to war tax resistance in the course of a segment telling the story of the history of the Mennonites and another comic dramatization of a whimsical tax resister. Check out the “Garrison Keillor talks about the history of Mennonites” and “Catchup” segments in the archives.

IRS Woes

• The Treasury Department’s inspector-general issued a report stating that over a recent ten-year period, 1580 IRS employees “were found to have willfully evaded taxes.” Most (75%) were not fired, and some later received promotions, raises, and bonuses.
• The number of people who renounced their U.S. citizenship is aiming toward another record high this year. The first quarter of the year saw 1,335 people tell Sam “you’re not my uncle” — a new record.

Tax Resistance Campaigns Around the World

• Spanish war tax resisters have produced a stylish video to promote their cause: No Pagamos (We Aren’t Paying):

• Police brutality, discrimination, and mistreatment towards Israel’s Ethopian Jewish minority has led to protests, clashes, and to Shlomo Molla, one of the few Ethiopian-Israelis to have been in the Israeli parliament, calling for tax resistance, refusal to serve in the army, and other forms of civil disobedience.
• Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican vicar, took his local council government to court, saying the £125 in fees it had added to the council tax that he had refused to pay in protest were excessive. He won his case.
• Payroll tax arrears are up 19% over the last fiscal year in Hong Kong and some are blaming the conscientious tax resistance movement (良心抗稅運動) that was launched as part of the pro-democracy “umbrella movement” there.
• Forty villages in Guragon, India have decided not to pay a new “house tax” the (Haryana) state government is trying to impose on them.
• The Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the northern Indian state of Jammu announced a policy of “total non-cooperation” including tax resistance in order to pressure the state government to meet its demands.

Simon Black runs a site called Sovereign Man that is designed for people who suspect that international financial and imperial powers are on the verge of an ugly collapse, and who want to make sure their own assets don’t go down with the ship.

The site recommends a radical geographical diversification: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t bet your whole life and future on one single country. You don’t have to live, work, bank, invest, save for retirement, own real estate, store gold, operate a business, etc., all in the same country of your citizenship.”

The site sells a variety of products and services designed to help you get this diversification going.

As Black explains, in a recent post on his site, tax resistance was one of his motives for expatriating to Chile. Excerpts:

On June 3, 2010 Joe’s life changed forever when he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan.

His story left me dumbstruck.

Like many veterans, Joe was left out in the cold by the US government.

He had a unique medical situation due to the nature of his amputation, and the FDA refused to allow him to undergo a new procedure that could help him walk again.

Needless to say, it was perfectly fine for the government that Joe take the risk of going overseas and getting his leg blown off. But getting his leg fixed was too risky.

Unbelievable.

So after being rejected by the very government he had served, Joe set out to get the procedure done himself.

It was going to get very expensive; since the FDA had outlawed the new procedure he needed, Joe would have to go overseas.

In total he needed to raise $80,000, and Joe was nowhere near making a dent in that goal.

After spending some time getting to know him and asking some close friends of mine who are renowned physicians to help me research the procedure he needed, I told Joe that I would pick up the tab for the surgery.

I’m pleased to say that Joe’s operation was successful…

Now I’ll let you in on a little secret: one of the reasons I was able to do this for Joe is because I’ve taken every legal step at my disposal to reduce and even eliminate the taxes that I owe to the US government.

Long ago I realized that every penny I paid to the federal government was being squandered on waste, debt, and war.

I was effectively footing the bill to send more guys like Joe overseas to get their legs blown off.

And I knew that I had to do something about it. I couldn’t in good conscience continue to support such mindless destruction.

But rather than take out my frustration in a voting booth, or putting a sign in my front yard with some candidate’s name on it, I went down a different path: taking completely legal steps to reduce my taxes.

In his case this meant expatriating and taking advantage of the fact that if you’re earning your money elsewhere, the U.S. government won’t tax you on the first hundred thousand or so that you earn.

I recognize this is a touchy subject. Lifelong tax propaganda tells us that “it’s a privilege to pay taxes” and that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

And most people believe this drivel despite every objective shred of evidence showing that taxes fund war, destructive bureaucracy, and debt.

Just look at the numbers from last year’s US federal budget—

Nearly 80% of the individual income tax collected went to war and interest payments on the debt. It is the antithesis of civilization.

Is this really where you want your money to go?

If you love your country, or at least the ideas that it’s supposed to represent, then reducing politicians’ powers to destroy it should be considered an act of patriotism.

And there is no more effective way of doing this than by restricting their financial resources.

Using the completely legal rules from their own tax code to reduce what you owe not only makes financial sense, it is an incredibly powerful, nonviolent way of affecting real change.

So another rare example of a tax resister who straddles the line between the “sovereign citizen”-style tax protester and the conscientious objector-style war tax resister.

Some international tax resistance news that has flashed over my screen in recent days:

Catalonia

• A report in Negocios.com suggests that the campaign to get Catalan municipalities to send their taxes to the Catalan government rather than to Spain has flopped. According to the report, only 70 to 80 of the 941 municipalities signed on to the largely-symbolic tax resistance plan, even though in 248 of them, Catalan separatists have a governing majority.
• On the other hand, this report says that Catalonia is well on its way to creating an independent tax agency and that mass tax resistance is only a matter of time.

The U.K.

• Low-income workers in Britain are becoming subject to council taxes from which they were previously exempt. The councils are expecting mass tax refusal and some are comparing it to Thatcher’s Poll Tax.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo

• Tax collection in the North Kivu region ground to a halt in a protest against degraded security in the region.

Spain

• The High Court of Valencia recently declared that Spanish citizens do not have the right to withhold tax payments for reasons of conscientious objection to military spending.

Greece

• 4,000 people in Crete have each paid only €1 of their road taxes in a protest there. The action was organized by «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Paying”), which last year held a similar protest that only attracted some dozens of participants. The group is protesting against rising taxes at a time of increasing economic difficulties, and that the taxes are not actually going to crucially needed road improvements. That group is also organizing protests at government auctions of seized property.

global

• A record number of U.S. citizens renounced their citizenship last quarter and we’re set for another record year of this.

Some links that have flashed by my browser in recent days:

IRS Follies

• It takes so long to reach the IRS by phone that a company has gone into business selling places in the phone queue. That’s right. They have many lines on which they call the IRS and stay on hold, and then you call them and buy the line that has been on hold longest so you don’t have to wait so long. Somewhere, a star on Obama’s economic team is tallying this up as “innovative job creation.”
• Identity thieves have been so successful at stealing “refunds” from the IRS by filing phony tax returns by using the social security numbers of other people that the IRS started issuing a supplemental identification number — an “E-file PIN” — that taxpayers could use to prove that it really was them filing their return. Because they figured the identity thieves, having stolen one identification number, wouldn’t be able to steal the second one, I guess.
• The number of IRS employees continues to fall. The agency says it plans to shed another 2–3,000 people this year.

International Tax Resistance News

• Anjali Damania and Alyque Padamsee have started a taxpayers union and have launched a tax strike to protest government corruption in India.

  Padamsee claimed that he always does everything legal and correct. He said, “I checked with lawyers. We are a group of like-minded people, and the tax paying population of this country, and they said, anyone who works together could form a union. And by law, a union is allowed to strike. We will strike by not paying tax. We plan to assemble a million people with a fee of Re 1 each, but all this is at the planning stage. We are talking with senior lawyers and will have them on board. Our main aim will be to make the government accountable. If there are any recommendations, people can contact me.”

  However, it is not yet specified which tax the Tax Payers’ Union will not pay, as there are various taxes in India, and most of them are indirect tax, which one pays in form of service, or while buying products. The other important taxes which concern an individual directly, include income tax and professional tax.

  This idea seems to be catching on. Justice Arun Chaudhari, from the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court, in a ruling during a recent corruption case, said:

  In my considered opinion, corruption can be beaten if all work together. To eradicate the cancer of corruption — the “hydra-headed monster,” it is now a high time for the citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough. That is the miasma of of corruption. If the same continues, taxpayers may resort to refuse to pay taxes by “non-cooperation movement.”

• Tommaso Cerno, a journalist and gay rights activist in Friuli, Italy, has made waves by announcing, in a letter published in Repubblica, a tax strike for gay rights.
• George Theofanou, who participated in the “won’t pay” protests against road tolls in Greece, has been charged €21,787.20 by the Greek tax agency for his failure to pay €427.20 in tolls. Theofanou issued a defiant letter, denouncing the “mafia” government and vowing to continue resisting.
• Farmers are the latest group to organize to protest taxes in Greece, driving their tractors to Athens, blocking highways, and attacking government buildings.
• Textile businesses in Vaishali were shuttered as the textile union launched a strike against a new tax.

War Tax Resistance

• My Waging Nonviolence article, on how the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund is a model for civil disobedience campaigns by demonstrating how to blunt the force of government deterrents, has been picked up by Truthout and OWSNe.ws.
• The POWERevolution blog has a new post about war tax resistance. Excerpt:

  If the government does not allow us the freedom to direct our taxes toward more enriching and sustainable funds, we will begin the process of taking that freedom for ourselves. We will discontinue paying taxes to the government, and instead redirect our money into a community fund that distributes our income in a way that serves all of us. As long as we continue paying for the current system in the form of taxes, we are complicit in the violence and corruption committed by it. By withdrawing our funding of it, we withdraw our consent of its actions.

• Bernard J. Berg recalls how he came out of the U.S. military doubtful that what he was doing deserved to be called “service”:

  I too served in the Navy, just before Vietnam, helping to keep the sea lanes safe for United Fruit Co. and the Dulles brothers. I later joined the war tax resistance effort sponsored by Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern. Money which should have gone to the IRS to pay for our war crimes went into the fund to be used for worthy causes. But the IRS had the last laugh as it garnered my bank account and got more money for illegal wars with the fines it extracted from me.

Miscellany

• I just learned about the following presentation which was made at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference, and features Angela Keaton from AntiWar.com, Carla Gericke of the Free State Project, and Teresa Warmke of Fr33Aid, discussing how nonprofits can benefit from using BitCoin:

• The number of U.S. citizens who are renouncing their citizenship is climbing, continuing a dramatic trend since 2008.

Some tabs I’ve had open in recent days…

International

• The regional government of Catalonia continues to lay down the groundwork for independence from Spain. Recently, the Diputación de Barcelona, which governs multiple municipalities in the Barcelona area, has decided to pay the taxes withheld from its nearly 5,000 employees to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain. A number of smaller local government bodies in Catalonia had already taken this step. Currently, the Catalan regional tax agency is forwarding such payments to the Spanish government, so this is mostly symbolic, but it is meant also to allow the Catalan regional government to withhold these payments at a later date when the time seems ripe for full independence.
• In Acapulco, businesses are petitioning the government to forgive their taxes on the grounds that the government is failing utterly to provide security and so they need the cash to pay protection money to organized crime groups.
• Jewelers in India have ended their 18-day strike which had been called to protest a new excise tax on gold sales. The government has suspended collection of the charge for sixty days pending the report from a committee that was formed to look into the jewelers’ grievances. The jewelers are estimated to have lost some $4.5 billion in sales during the strike. This is the third time the government has suspended the tax in response to protests.
• When Premlata Bhansali was caught on the metro without a ticket, she said she was fed up with high-rollers getting away with corruption. She refused to pay her fine, taking a seven-day jail term instead and “spent nearly 12 hours arguing with railway officials, demanding to know why they authorities were going soft on [corrupt politician and crony capitalist Vijay] Mallya and harassing the common man.”

United States

• Americans apparently prefer Vladimir Putin to the Internal Revenue Service, but on the other hand 27% of us would be willing to get an IRS tattoo (if that would get us out of paying taxes). Almost 25% of Americans think there’s nothing wrong with earning money under the table and keeping the IRS in the dark.
• Meanwhile the number of U.S. citizens renouncing their citizenship continues to skyrocket. With all the people threatening to leave after the November elections, Mexico may find it has an incentive to build that wall after all.
• NWTRCC has caught the “divestment” bug, and is reminding activists that whether your target of choice is fossil fuel consumption, Israeli apartheid, or militarism, you can get the biggest bang for your buck by divesting from the Pentagon by refusing to pay war taxes.

There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:

• an invitation to the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in Pennsylvania
• a discussion of U.S. citizenship and war tax resisters — both getting citizenship and giving it up
• notes on the Jeju naval base and the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy
• actions by Don Schrader, Don Timmerman, and Phil Runkel
• a profile of war tax resister Kathy Labriola

In other war tax resistance news:

• NWTRCC is keeping a list of nationwide war tax resistance protest actions taking place between now and tax day.
• Here’s a graphic and write-up from a member of Conscience Canada, the peace tax / war tax resistance group from the great white north, as found in Canadian Mennonite.
• Paper Money carried an article on the “Thoreau Money” banknote-like leaflets that were used by war tax resistance groups in the United States during the Vietnam War. The article goes into unusual detail about the history and structure of the war tax resistance movement in that period.
• War tax resistance season has begun in Spain, too. Here’s the announcement from Derecho de Rebelión.
• The group Conscience, from the U.K., has finalized its version of “peace tax” legislation, which it hopes to get Parliament to consider. It differs in some ways from other countries’ versions of this plan for implementing legalized conscientious objection to military taxation.

In the first quarter of 2016, 1,158 people expatriated or renounced their U.S. citizenship, continuing a trend of rising numbers of people turning their backs on the U.S.

The number of published expatriates for the quarter was 1,158. Only a few years ago, we would have been surprised by such a large quarterly number. Now having over 1,000 published expatriates per quarter appears to be the new normal.

Some links that have caught my eye in recent weeks:

• Venetian separatists in Italy launched a tax strike a while back. Last month, the government struck back, arresting 20 people in 19 raids in Vicenza, Treviso, and Verona and charging them with inciting tax evasion.
• Expatriations escalating again. Is it politics or taxes? More than 3,000 people have renounced their U.S. citizenship so far this year.
• The government of France has given up on the despised ecotaxe that was opposed by the bold direct action tactics of the bonnets rouges. The government had put the highway tax on indefinite suspension, in the wake of the many destructions of automated toll portals and other tax-collecting machinery, mostly in Brittany. A recent vote of the French Assembly has gone further, formally taking the tax off the books.
• Sam Koplinka-Loehr, the recently-hired outreach coordinator for NWTRCC, recently held an on-line seminar on “Refusing to Pay for Oppression”, a recording of which is available on-line.
• Koplinka-Loehr also testified at the People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War, and spoke about this on the Clearing the Fog show.
• “A couple [in Dartmouth, U.K.] have stopped paying their council tax due to the ‘complete inefficiency’ of South Hams District Council’s waste collection department.”
• The “Won’t Pay” movement in Greece is still engaging guerrilla electricians to reconnect the power to families who have been cut off for being unable (or unwilling) to pay the price hikes of the state power monopoly.
• Some activists who are infuriated by the incoming Trump administration have started a “Stop Trump Tax Protest” on Facebook.

In other news:

• The Number Of Americans Renouncing Their U.S. Citizenship Hit All-Time High In 2016 (Up 26% From 2015).
  • And not only that, but this is after the government jacked up the cost: “Previously, there was a $450 fee to renounce, and no fee to relinquish. Now, there is a $2,350 fee either way. The State Department said raising the fee was about demand and paperwork, but the number of American expatriations still increased after the fee hike.”
• Erica Weiland, at the NWTRCC blog, notes the connection between militarization and Trump’s crazy border wall plan.
• “White Powder Scare Causes Evacuation of Philadelphia IRS Building” — this one doesn’t even look like it was a mailed-in hoax, just a case where “someone discovered a powder in some cubicles on the third floor.” Seems like a great way for IRS employees to extend their lunch breaks.

As “Tax Day” has come and gone in the United States, we’ve had more than our usual share of tax resistance news:

• Long-time war tax resister Larry Bassett sent a letter to the IRS concerning his unusually large tax refusal this year. Excerpt:

  I am resisting the $128,005 I owe in federal income tax for 2016 because nearly 50% of anything I do pay will go for war or preparation for war. I cannot in good conscience pay for war. I have donated more than that amount to meet human needs internationally and nationally and locally.

  The News & Advance covered his story: “Lynchburg ‘war tax resister’ speaks about pacifist lifestyle”
• Olympia-area man says he won’t pay tax bill until he sees Trump’s tax return. Phil Miller is the latest example of a new phenomenon — tax resisters motivated by a specific anti-Trump agenda, rather than a more administration-agnostic policy like militarism.
• Here’s another in that genre: Americans Should Refuse to Pay Federal Income Tax if Trump Does Not Release Tax Returns (If the president doesn’t pay taxes, why should American citizens?) says Ben Cohen of The Daily Banter.
• Dozens of people have signed on to a public statement of war tax refusal. Excerpt: “Nearly half of the federal income tax is funding endless war and war preparations. In good conscience, we will not pay this war tax.”
• War Tax Resisters in Tompkins County, New York, “opted to donate federal income tax dollars or some of their tax refunds to a local organization that helps people re-enter the community from prison or jail.”
• No War, No Trump: Tax Resisters Withhold Support reports Josh Brokaw at TruthSayers.
• Tax Day Protests Highlight Refusal to Pay for War reports Popular Resistance.
• Here are some photos from a tax day war tax resistance demonstration at the IRS building in New York City, and here’s a brief video clip.
• Lindsay Koshgarian, at truthout, writes about Where Your Dollars Are Going: Why Some Antiwar Activists Are Withholding Taxes (but spends most of the article defending government spending and the taxes that fund it).
• There may be more political or conscientious tax resistance going on than meets the eye. Three authors from the U.C. San Diego Department of Economics look at the available data across the United States and conclude that “the larger the typical share of county residents who vote for the president’s party, the smaller the tax gap across a variety of tax gap measures.”
• Here are some photos and video from a tax day protest put on by Citizens for Peace in Space.
• “This Man Can Help You Escape the IRS Forever” breathlessly writes Mother Jones. The article is about a legal adviser who helps wealthy people get themselves and their assets expatriated to low-tax areas.
• NWTRCC recaps this year’s tax season at its blog.

More links of interest:

• A new TIGTA report says that the IRS frequently rehires employees it has previously fired for a variety of conduct or performance problems. For example:

  Auditors reviewed the records of 213 former employees brought back onboard in the Covington, Ky., office from July 2016 to March 2017 and found 96 had separated from the agency while being investigated. Of those, 19 had potential tax code violations, 4 had accessed taxpayer accounts without authorization, 13 had falsified forms, 2 had misused email or equipment, and 6 had been accused of misconduct such as absences without leave, workplace disruption or failure to follow instructions.

• Meanwhile, the GAO says that the IRS has failed to repair many computer security issues that it has previously identified. “[T]axpayer data will remain unnecessarily vulnerable to inappropriate and undetected use, modification, or disclosure,” the report says.
• Remember the myRA? No? Well, it wasn’t very memorable. It was a way to try to get more people to start up retirement accounts by making it cheaper and easier and less risky. President Obama launched the program in 2014. Here’s what I had to say about it then. In short, I wasn’t impressed. The accounts would ultimately be invested in government bonds, and so would constitute a loan to the government. It seems, though, that very few people were interested in participating in the program. It’s now been scrapped.
• The number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship is on a record-setting pace again this year.

This is the forty-first in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we reach the end of the 1990s.

Peace Tax Fund bill advocate Marian Franz wrote about “The claims of God and Caesar” in the 6 April 1999 edition. She began by highlighting how entwined tax issues are with the stories related in the gospels. She then highlighted the spending priorities of the U.S. government — how much it spends on weapons while crucial needs remain underfunded — and on the related spending priorities of Mennonites:

John Stoner did an analysis that found that for every $9 Mennonites spend on their military taxes they give $5 to charitable causes.

She told of Dan Slabaugh, who in 1975 “was plowing his field, and at one point he knelt on the ground and promised God he would never again let a penny of his earned income go for military use.” Slabaugh wrote his Senator about this, and that Senator, Mark Hatfield, went on to introduce a Peace Tax Fund Bill.

She also told of Claus Felbinger, a 16^th Century Hutterite martyr who had said that “When… the government requires of us what is contrary to our faith and conscience, such as swearing oaths and paying hangman’s dues and taxes for war, then we do not obey its commands.”

And she related (for the first time, I think, in The Mennonite, remarkably) the story of World War Ⅰ-era American Mennonite John Schrag, who was attacked by a mob for refusing to buy war bonds.

She then went on to plug the Peace Tax Fund bill, suggesting it would provide a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes and have “the military portion” safely disinfected of its militaristic taint. She also said she found lobbying for the bill to be a useful way of introducing conscientious objection to military taxation to new audiences, such as religious groups outside of the traditional peace churches, and to politicians and bureaucrats.

The same issue included an article about war tax resistance by Steve Ratzlaff. He asserted: “It isn’t possibly to pray for peace and pay for war unless you suffer from delusions or a split personality disorder… Yet 99 percent of Mennonites do that very thing.”

The problem lies in our split personality, in the mental gymnastics we use to excuse ourselves from the reality of our actions. We have separated our actions from our belief by rationalizing that we don’t really have any choice; the government requires us to pay taxes. That is true. But the government required that we serve in the army before the Alternative Service Act was passed in the 1940s. We refused to serve in the armed forces then. Once they accommodated us by granting us conscientious objector status, we gladly gave them our money so they could continue to kill in our names. And they do kill, through aggressive military maneuvers and supporting almost every government in the world through the sale of arms.

We have separated our pocketbooks from our consciences. Money has become the topic that is nobody’s business but our own. As a result, we allow no one to hold us accountable for the way we spend it. That includes our tax money as well. We take the path of least resistance and pay the military portion of our taxes, even though that may violate our conscience.

We Mennonites are sick. We are schizophrenic when it comes to taxes that go for war. And our government is thankful for that. It was a small price to give us the option of alternative service. They really are more concerned that we continue to provide them with the cash needed to pay for their wars and military build-ups.

The unconditional support of the military that our government asks of us is obscene. We have withdrawn support from welfare mothers and aid to dependent children while increasing corporate welfare to the military industry. As a people of peace we cannot continue to pay for such irresponsibility in good conscience. It is time for us to listen seriously to our consciences again and to refuse to pay for such atrocities. We are a conscientious people that have lost our way and fallen ill. It’s time to address our personality disorder and listen once again to Jesus’ call to be peacemakers, not war supporters.

An editorial by J. Lorne Peachey in the same issue tried to sum all of this up, but also to deflect its urgency. He began by quoting 2 Timothy 2:23 — “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels” — and he suggested that the issue of taxpayer complicity was such a controversy.

This prompted several letters which were printed over the next few issues:

• John F. Murray wrote to say that he had determined the best course of action was not to reduce your income below the tax line, nor to withhold taxes due from the government, nor to support a Peace Tax Fund bill, but to donate generously to the church in order to take a large tax deduction.
• Another letter, from Steve Martin, had other suggestions:

  Until the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill becomes reality, it would appear that the only ways to ensure that one’s tax dollars not go to military usage is to keep income below taxable levels or refuse to pay all taxes. The government currently will first take taxes for military purposes regardless of whether one pays the military portion or not. Thus by not paying the military portion, it appears one ultimately cuts money available for social programs rather than the military. To stay below taxable levels, one may cut actual income below the taxable level or go beyond Ratzlaff’s suggestion that the military portion of income taxes be given to some organization such as Mennonite Central Committee and give all actual income above the taxable level to charitable purposes. One wonders what our Mennonite agencies could do if the latter practice was followed by the large majority of their constituencies.

• Steven J. Olshewsky followed up with a letter in which he pointed out the practical difficulties of using charitable giving as a way of reducing a taxable income to a tax-free income, among other things.
• John M. Eby expressed his disappointment that “[t]here apparently has been no new thinking on the subject of war taxes since the last time this was a burning issue.”

  Caesar comes at us like a highwayman, willing and able to come in and take whatever Caesar determines to be his share. Due to interest and penalties, those who make a show of resisting will end up rendering more than those who do not resist. This is the first paradox of the war tax issue.

  When there is little or no money available, Caesar quickly loses interest. Those who choose to live on the lower fringe of Caesar’s economy are not expected to render. However, if we all choose to live on that fringe, there will be no money to support the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. No money for Mennonite Central Committee. Little or no money for the panoply of camps, boards, schools, publications, etc., that are the visible representations of our attempts to do church. We all recognize, at least in theory, that we cannot serve both God and mammon. But we have yet to figure out how to serve God without at least some mammon. I suppose this is the second paradox of the war tax issue.

• Jacob Tice suggested a novel approach:

  I would like to register a legal way to avoid paying that I haven’t seen mentioned yet: live and earn your income abroad. U.S. citizens can exclude up to $72,000 (1998) of foreign earned income (they are taxed on worldwide income) as long as they meet the IRS requirements for the foreign country being their “tax home” or for being “bona fide residents” of the foreign country.

  After over eight years of living in Panama, my wife, three children, and I have attained permanent residency status… but are also still U.S. citizens. In these eight years of dairy farming in Panama, I have been required to pay U.S. self-employment taxes (Social Security) but have not needed to pay any U.S. income tax. (And with an exclusion of up to $72,000, I do not anticipate needing to pay any.) I’m liable for Panamanian income tax but, as a dairy farmer, have not yet needed to pay any.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• At Riversong HouseWright, war tax resister Robert Riversong recalls the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner house seizure of 1989–1994 in the context of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” theory. He also shares many photos from the protests that accompanied the seizure, and from the cooperative home-building project that grew out of it.
• The surge in the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship seems to have slowed after having accelerated for several years.
• The recent Republican tax rate cuts were offset by a growing economy such that while corporate taxes have fallen so far this year, individual income taxes have risen enough to more than make up for it.
• The Kenya Motorists Association has called on drivers to park their vehicles in the middle of thoroughfares during morning commute times to protest a tax hike on motor vehicle fuel.
• Rebel neighbors in McKillop, Sasketchewan, have organized to refuse to pay property taxes after they were nearly doubled by their Rural Municipality council. “None of us really cared before,” one of the resisters said. “We just shut up and paid our taxes. But something like this is bringing us together.”

Today I’ll share some links about tax policy and tax resistance in the United States that have caught my attention recently.

First, though: I’ve started a Wikipedia page on Tax resistance in the United States that covers how theories about tax resistance have shaped (and been shaped in) the U.S., and how tax resistance in practice has played out in the country. Wikipedia is an open, collaborative project that anyone can help to edit, so I encourage you to learn what it’s all about and how to help make it better.

Now on to the links:

Tax Evasion

• The New York Times got its hands on a trove of financial documents concerning the real estate empire of Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and published a well-done exposé on what they found. From the point of view of today’s political squabbles and tomorrow’s history lessons, the takeaway is that Donald Trump’s brand, in which he is represented as a self-made business prodigy, is a laughable con job. From our vantage, however, what’s interesting is the extent to which the Trump family used legal, effectively-legal, and illegal methods to evade taxes. They paid a fraction of what they owed, again and again. This may help bolster the widespread feeling that rich people commonly get away with tax evasion, sticking it to the little guy. This in turn erodes “tax morale” which causes voluntary tax compliance to fall.
• Another bit of journalism hammering on this theme (though more free-wheeling and not as methodically precise) comes from GQ: “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich”. Apparently if you can convince the IRS that you’ve become a permanent resident of the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, you’ll find yourself in “the only place on U.S. soil where personal income from capital gains, interest, and dividends are untaxed.”

General Government Failure

• “The federal government could soon pay more in interest on its debt than it spends on the military, Medicaid or children’s programs.” Thus begins a New York Times article on the growing federal government debt. “Within a decade, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on myriad other programs. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” The more the federal government is reduced to being a collection agency for bondholders, the less mischief it can get up to elsewhere. Far from addressing this problem, today’s policymakers are exacerbating it, so we have more such headlines to look forward to.
• Alex Tabarrok and Michael Makowsky used some clever data mining to unveil that when governments make it profitable for police to arrest black and Hispanic people (through property forfeiture laws that allow police to profit from the booty they seize), such arrests increase. They conclude: “The prospects for justice are dimmed when the probability an individual is arrested varies not only by the character of their transgression but also by the potential windfall they present to the public coffer.”
• It’s hard to tell your cops from your robbers, that’s for sure. Take for instance Officer Ebony Nesbitt of the Miami-Dade police force… recently arrested for her part in raking in half a million dollars by filing false tax returns in an identity theft scam.

IRS Follies

• The National Taxpayer Advocate says that the IRS is cooking the books when they report their numbers on how their phone “customer” service is doing just fine. For one thing, they don’t measure the phone numbers with the worst service. For another, they don’t count getting tangled up in an unhelpful “press X for Y” phone menu and then hanging up in frustration as an unsuccessful call. For another, they count merely talking to an IRS operator as a successful call, whether the operator was able to resolve the problem or not.
• The Tax-Expatriation blog has gotten its hands on a letter from the U.S. State Department refusing to issue a passport to a person with what the IRS categorizes as “a seriously delinquent tax debt”.

Miscellaneous

• Republicans are prone to complain about the percentage of U.S. households who are so poor they don’t have to pay income tax (remember Mitt Romney’s revealing “47%” comments way back when? Or the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies” editorials?). But that didn’t stop them from crafting their major tax legislation (the recent “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) in such a way that it will increase the percentage of American households who pay no federal income tax. The Tax Policy Center estimates that fully 44% of American households will pay no federal income taxes at all this year (2% more than last year). About 25% will pay no payroll tax either, or their payroll tax will be offset by a refundable income tax credit.
• “Millennials” (says the New York Times) are joining together to swap techniques for quitting the rat race and retiring early, in something called “the FIRE movement.” They begin to live more frugally, squirrel things away, take greater care of their investment decisions, and eye an early modest retirement or semi-retirement. Most of the examples in the article are of pretty well-off people who really just needed to stop living at or above the lifestyle they could afford. But it’s people like them who pay the taxes, and by stepping off the treadmill, they stop doing so or at least stop doing so much. So if you know anyone in that category, send them a link.
• About ten years ago the number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship began to shoot up, from what had been a normal range of two to eight hundred people a year to a high of 5,409 people in 2016. But things seem to have leveled off since then. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.

In other news…

• An international conference on war tax resistance is planned for later this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. It will also be the occasion for the general assembly of Conscience & Peace Tax International.
• The war on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continues, with several destroyed by rebels in France using fire and spray paint, and another destroyed by an accident it contributed to in Germany.
• Facebook has decided it will ban advertising that discourages people from voting. This should go to show that censorship is of course going to be practiced on behalf of the already powerful (who have the power to censor) and against unpopular heresies. But, you know, polite liberal golf claps is about all I hear.
• A poll of expatriate U.S. citizens showed that many are contemplating renouncing their U.S. citizenship, largely because of the tax (and onerous tax reporting) burden.
• Businesses in Pakistan are on strike to protest a sales tax increase.
• An IRS building in Kansas City, Missouri was shut down by a hazmat team because of “a brown substance on a package” discovered by an employee.

Some links from here and there:

• The “Extinction Rebellion” group launched its council tax strike in London at its “summer uprising” earlier this month. The group is trying to get the government to stop spending money on transportation and infrastructure projects that exacerbate climate change, and are taking the lead by redirecting their taxes to greener projects in an act of civil disobedience. Here is some coverage of the tax strike launch in Al Jazeera and from Financial Times.
• Fire, spray paint, demolition, bags and tape, even an axe… People around Europe are using a variety of means to fight back against the speed camera radar outposts that ticket drivers.
• At his Forbes blog, Robert W. Wood reminds us that the new Prime Minister of the U.K., Boris Johnson, also renounced his U.S. citizenship so as to stop paying taxes to Uncle Sam.
• Merchants in Budalangi, Kenya, have organized to threaten the government there with a tax strike. The Mau Mau Market Business Association chairman issued a statement saying that unless the government makes necessary infrastructure improvements, the traders will begin refusing to pay taxes on September 1^st.
• The Société Civile group in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo, has again called for a boycott of taxes to protest the government’s inability to provide security.

Some recent links of note:

• The right-wing British press is aghast at news that the Extinction Rebellion movement plans to add tax resistance to its tactics. However, I haven’t seen anything about this from Extinction Rebellion itself, so I’m left wondering whether this is just a manufactured brouhaha for headlines. That movement did launch a brief council tax strike in London last year, but as far as I have been able to tell, nothing much came of it.
• During the Great Depression, property taxes went up even as people became increasingly unable to pay. A result was organized taxpayer leagues and property tax strikes. Stephen Mihm, at Bloomberg Opinion, wonders whether such tax revolts might return as businesses shutter and rent strikes bloom, reducing the ability to pay of property owners.
• The number of Americans who renounced their U.S. citizenship reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2020.
• Attacks on traffic ticket robots continue in Europe, with recent attacks in France and Italy and yet more in France. The number of tickets and the revenue from them were both down about 25% last year in France.

In other news:

• A report on the 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns has been published.
• The National Front of Catalonia is skeptical about the calls to tax resistance coming out of the Council for the Republic, noting that it had failed to stand behind tax resisters in the past who had responded to such calls. Essentially: Catalan patriots took the tax resistance seriously, but their politicians only meant it rhetorically. In addition, the call for resistance seems to have been an eleventh-hour afterthought, being issued just as tax returns were coming due, and too late for most taxpayers to prepare the groundwork for effective resistance.
• The number of people renouncing their U.S. citizenship is shooting up again. Each of the first two quarters of 2020 have had more official expatriates than any other quarter since record-keeping began (however there were unusually low numbers in the last two quarters of 2019, so this may be an artifact of some glitch in the bureaucracy). This in spite of the fact that the U.S. now charges thousands of dollars to people who want to relinquish their citizenship.

Some tabs that have passed through my browser in recent days:

• Two limericks I wrote, inspired by current events, were selected for the Center for a Stateless Society’s Fall 2020 poetry feature.
• Milwaukee’s WUWM profiled war tax resister Don Timmerman.
• The IRS looks unlikely to be able to comply gracefully with the terms of the Paperwork Reduction Act as it rolls out its 2021 income tax forms. This might give taxpayers some creative avenues for gumming up the system.
• On the 300^th anniversary of the birth of Quaker war tax resister John Woolman, FEE gave an overview of Woolman’s abolitionist work.
• Traffic ticket robots continue to suffer attacks, lately in France, Germany, & Italy, yet more in France, France again, and France & Italy.
• In the New York Times, economist Robert H. Frank explains how tax evasion can balloon quickly when tax enforcement falls below a tipping-point.
• Ruth Benn, at NWTRCC’s blog, takes aim at the “All or Nothing Syndrome” in which some people give up on doing war tax resistance at all because they don’t feel capable of going all-in and resisting everything.
• David S. D’Amato, at libertarianism.org pens an admiring look at the life of Christian anarchist tax resister Ammon Hennacy.
• The number of Americans declared to be renouncing their U.S. citizenship hit an all-time high this year and only three quarters into the year, too.
• Peace activists in Ireland who broke into Shannon Airport to decommission U.S. military aircraft stationed there have been found not guilty by a jury, who apparently agreed with the defense argument that they were lawfully justified in their actions.

Some recent links from hither and yon:

• Do citizens of the United States have a presumptive right to travel elsewhere, or is that a privilege that the government may withhold at its whim? This has become a live question thanks to the newish law by which the State Department can revoke passports from (or deny passports to) people the IRS reports have significant unpaid taxes. Papers, Please! reviews the state of the law and the tenuous right to travel.
• Meanwhile, a record number of wealthy Americans relinquished their U.S. citizenship in 2020.
• Catalan restaurateurs, who protested for independence by redirecting their taxes from Spain to essential services in Catalonia for seven years, have been hit by a €300,000 fine by the Treasury agency in Madrid. They responded with receipts and an accounting of where the money went — including to local schools and hospitals — but the tax agency was unmoved. They plan to continue their fight and have started an on-line fundraiser to help pay their legal bills.
• The IRS is “pleading for patience” as it deals with the backlog of last year’s tax returns it hasn’t processed yet. I filed my return back in April or thereabouts and the IRS hasn’t processed it yet. I always file my tax returns on paper by hand so I’m not too surprised that mine ended up on the procrastination shelf.
• Plans to boost enforcement funding and enable more financial surveillance by the IRS were dropped from the big “infrastructure” bill that’s working its way through Congress. From what I hear there may be some attempt to resurrect these plans as part of the budget reconciliation process, so stay tuned.
• There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out.

Some links from here and there:

• NWTRCC is promoting a “Refuse to Pay for War Sign-On Statement” next year.

  We are divesting from war by refusing some or all of our federal tax dollars that fund it, or by living below the taxable income level. We invite you to join us publicly in this act of civil disobedience to war and war funding.

  If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, sign up on their page and thereby band together with your fellow-resisters.
• The Mennonite Church USA issued a Statement on the value and morality of the 2022 U.S. defense budget. Excerpt:

  Our… 2015 resolution, “Faithful Witness Amid Endless War,” calls us to seek and implement public ecumenical witness to our confession: “Some trust in their war chariots and others in their horses, but we trust in the power of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7).

  How do we place our trust in the power of God while a massive expenditure of our tax dollars trusts in high-tech weaponry to keep us safe? In this routine legislative act, we are challenged to reflect deeply on where we place our security and allegiance.

  The creation of MC USA’s Church Peace Tax Fund provides individuals with a tangible way to support the church’s ongoing peace mission, while symbolically protesting government spending on war and militarism.

  Are there 100 new war tax resisters among us?

• The number of Americans who formally renounce their citizenship hit new highs last year.
• José Luis Espert, a member of parliament in Argentina, called for tax resistance in a recent editorial (and then doubled down in a series of tweets). Espert notes that the tax burden and government spending have both doubled as a proportion of gross domestic product over the past fifty years, as deficit spending has repeatedly put the Argentine economy into crisis. This tax burden falls heavily on the above-ground economy, whose workers, he claims, work half of their working year just to pay their annual taxes. He despairs of politicians ever overcoming the perverse incentives that drive this problem, and so:

  To adjust public spending, the powers that be are clear that they will never do it the right way, but prefer that it be done the hard way with the people starved into a crisis, and this is why a tax rebellion by Argentine taxpayers is necessary. In order to put an end to the immorality of a clique of disgraceful politicians who prefer that we be a Maduro-less Venezuela than for them to be responsible when it comes to collecting and spending.

  Yes. The people have to stop paying taxes…

• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the robot traffic ticket camera hordes continues, with saws and spray paint disabling cameras in France and fire, gunfire, and blunt force taking out a few more in France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.

Your up-to-the-minute tax resistance news:

• The IRS is giving off a powerful odor of desperation as it enters tax filing season. The agency has a backlog of some fourteen million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence from previous years still to get through. Some taxpayers have complained of getting upsetting notices that the agency had no record of them filing their taxes last year, when in fact their tax return is still sitting in this gigantic pile (or has been lost in the shuffle). Members of Congress, smelling blood in the water, signed a letter demanding that the IRS stop harassing taxpayers in this way. (Memo to Congress: you don’t have to resort to pleading in a letter; the IRS is part of the federal government and you could pass legislation to fix this if you really meant it.) The agency responded by suspending some such taxpayer notices but also noting that by law, if they don’t send certain notices out, they lose the ability to pursue people who actually did fail (or refuse) to file. Meanwhile, the agency is shifting 1,200 employees from their regular duties (like enforcement) to doing data entry so as to try to whittle down this backlog.
• Florida Man is back in the news, this time for using IRS databases to download people’s past tax returns and then filing additional fake returns in their names in order to get fraudulent refunds.

• That sort of identity theft and refund fraud has made the IRS eager to tighten up security. They’re under pressure to allow taxpayers to conveniently view their tax statements and other such information on-line in the same way they have come to expect to view their bank accounts, utility bills, and everything else in our digital age. On the other hand, cunning and not-so-cunning fraudsters like Florida Man see such convenient access as a recklessly-guarded vault full of government money ripe for the picking. What is the IRS to do?

  Their response was to invite the usual suspects in government contracting to bid on a contract to square the circle and make the problem go away. The winning bidder apparently was military contractor ID.me, and the IRS has begun rolling out their solution and telling users of on-line IRS account services that they’ll need to reenroll with ID.me if they want to continue to access their accounts. However, the rollout has gone poorly. As I noted last month the sign-up process is clumsy, time-consuming, and buggy. It’s also uncomfortably invasive — requiring a face scan and copies of a variety of documents. ID.me sent out a press release claiming that those face scans were only used in a very limited way to verify identity but then had to walk back that claim when it was shown to be untrue. Privacy advocates and people & groups with a host of other concerns have been urging the IRS to reconsider.

• Lincoln Rice, who heads the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), was interviewed on the Tax Chats podcast.
• Danny Burns’s excellent history of the Poll Tax Rebellion has been released in free text and PDF forms on-line, apparently with the blessing of the author.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.

• As I noted late last year, the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs again. But that’s not the whole story. As it turns out, in order to renounce your citizenship, you first have to appear in person at an embassy or consulate for an “exit interview.” And, with the covid epidemic as an excuse, these offices have been refusing to grant such interviews, meaning that thousands of Americans who would like to formally renounce their citizenship have been prohibited from doing so.

  Clarification: the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs in 2020, according to numbers released last year, but it looks like last year’s numbers dropped considerably from there, with the unwillingness of embassies to process renunciations being one reason for the drop. ―♇ 6 February 2022

• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the robot traffic ticket hordes continues, with humans taking robots out of action in the United States, France, Martinique, and Italy and in the United States, Italy, New Zealand, and France in recent weeks.

Some tax resistance news from hither and yon:

• A group of people in the Netherlands called “Belastingstaking voor Klimaat” (“Tax Strike for Climate”) have decided to no longer “silently pay for global warming” via government subsidies of fossil fuels. They are refusing to pay 5% of their income tax, as that is their rough estimate of how much of central government spending (and tax breaks) subsidizes CO₂-generating companies: about €17.5 billion per year. They are also using the official tax adjustment and appeals process to press their claims

  

• The “Don’t Pay U.K.” has been ramping up its public protests. One of their tactics is to stage protests in warmed public buildings (to highlight how prohibitively expensive it is to heat their own homes). In one action, the protesters sang a song to the tune of Your Cheatin’ Heart including the lyrics “your heating chart will tell on you”.

  

• American war tax resisters Robert Randall and Marjorie Nelson have died. Randall was a regular participant at NWTRCC events like their periodic national meetings and the School of the Americas protests, and is one of a small, select group of war tax resisters who have had their homes seized by the IRS for their refusal. Marjorie Nelson worked as a physician with a Quaker war relief program in Vietnam during the American war there, and survived 50 days as a prisoner of war after she was captured during the Tet Offensive. In 1994 she tangled with the IRS in court after the agency hit her with a “frivolous filing” penalty for taking a “war tax deduction” on her tax return.
• In response to a surge in Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship, the U.S. Department of State abruptly raised its fees for processing such renunciations from $450 up to $2,350 some years back. Now, in response to a lawsuit by some expats who claim this amounts to unjust coercion and a violation of their 5^th and 8^th Amendment rights, Rina Bitter, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, told the court “the Department intends to pursue rule-making to reduce the fee for processing CLN requests from the current amount of $2,350 to the previous fee of $450.”
• More attacks on automated traffic ticket-generating speed cameras in Germany and France.