The case of Cliven Bundy and his supporters — who stood down the federal government’s attempts to extract ranching fees from them — has been excruciatingly embarrassing for the federal government, which has racked up a string of failures in trying to win prosecutions against them.
In the latest case, the judge dismissed with prejudice all federal charges against Bundy and two co-defendants due to “flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.”
Pablo Hijar, city councilor of Zaragoza, Spain, from the Zaragoza en Común Party (a left-wing alliance), tweeted out a photo of himself tearing up his bill for the regional tax ICA, claiming that the tax is a boondoggle designed to force Zaragoza residents to pay for other regions’ sewer treatment plants, having already paid for their own independently.
“#IWon’tPay the #ICA,” he tweeted. “We want accountability for the scam of the Aragonese Plan for Water Purification, and rates that are fair (progressive) and transparent (in their purposes).”
He called on followers to demonstrate against the tax on .
Suffragist tax resister Abby Kelley Foster is getting some overdue recognition.
The Worcester, Massachusetts city council “voted unanimously to honor Abby Kelley Foster (1811–1887) for her long struggle for human rights, setting in motion an effort to erect a monument or statue in her honor,” thereby doing some measure of reparations for the city’s persecution of the woman for her refusal to pay taxes to a government in which she was not represented.
The presidency of Donald Trump is dangerous, and his policies are cruel and destructive.
But if we survive, the long-term damage he will have done to the prestige of the American government may be a blessing in disguise.
The Edelman marketing consultancy firm conducts an annual “Trust Barometer” survey of world public opinion.
Here’s what they found this year about America:
[T]rust in institutions in the United States crashed, posting the steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured.
…The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully undermined and has been replaced with a strong sense of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment.
Among the informed public, the trust crash is even steeper, with trust declining 23 points, dropping the U.S. from sixth to last place out of the 28 countries surveyed.
Vast swaths of Americans no longer trust their leaders.
Government had the steepest decline (14 points) among the general population.
Fewer than one in three believe that government officials are credible.
Here’s an aspect of the recently-passed federal tax reform legislation that had previously escaped my notice:
People who became disabled early in life, and their families, have for a few years been able to establish something called an ABLE Account.
These are a bit like Roth retirement accounts — the money you put into the accounts is taxed just like the rest of your income, but any returns on that money are not — but you can spend the money in the account on a variety of expenses connected with coping with the disability.
Anyway, these accounts aren’t entirely new, but what is new is that people who contribute to these accounts now qualify for the Retirement Savings Tax Credit, which can be really valuable for low-income tax resisters.
