Gandhi outlined three elements for social transformation and saw them as intertwined.
Social change will not come about by just doing one of them.
The three elements are personal transformation, political action, and constructive program.
Personal Transformation:
Gandhi saw this as a beginning, because even if each of us becomes “peaceful,” we still need to do more.…
In addition, personal transformation includes understanding the choices that we make.
In my own work with high school students, it is apparent that young people need to know about choices — how we live our lives, lifestyles choices, how we relate to others.
This can be the most important part of a workshop with young people, but it is something each and every one of us must explore.
War tax resistance is certainly an aspect of personal transformation, as we make decisions about what we do with our money, what we choose to support or refuse to support.
Political Action:
When asked what is nonviolent action, in the U.S. we often think of civil disobedience or particular actions.
I do an exercise in nonviolence trainings where I ask small groups to list 10 wars.
They do this quite quickly, but then they struggle to come up with 10 nonviolent campaigns.…
And usually they list tactics and movements rather than campaigns, not understanding the difference.
In contrast, when I’ve been in India, people describe nonviolent action as what they are doing in the villages, the constructive work they are doing.
Effective nonviolence is strategic.
Too often we see a problem but only think of single actions in response.
We don’t think strategically about a longer term response.
In her excellent speech at the opening of the World Social Forum in , Arundhati Roy said that even though the international anti-war outpouring on , was wonderful, it was a weekend, and, “Holiday protests don’t stop wars.”
In Gandhian campaigns of nonviolent action against specific evils, noncooperation is a key.
Gandhi’s Salt March initially involved only 80 people, but the act of picking up the salt from the sea and making their own salt in defiance of British taxed salt was revolutionary.
The power of the Salt March was that it became a massive campaign — there was something everyone could do.
Some packaged the salt, some sold it, all could refuse to buy the taxed salt and buy the alternative.
The people of India were saying no to the Empire and that became the turning point in their struggle for independence.
We say no as WTRs.
People in the military are saying no.
We need to explore more in our culture how we say no, how we noncooperate, and acknowledge that there is a network that exists that helps this happen.
Military resisters are not alone by and large.
These days Cindy Sheehan has helped galvanize the network and make it more connected.
To be effective political action, noncooperation needs to be one aspect of a strategic nonviolent campaign that might include other tactics such as protest, public pressure from boycotts, etc.
War tax resisters tend to be very experienced with the two elements above.
It is the third of Gandhi’s elements that we need to study and add to our efforts as we work for social transformation.
Constructive Program:
We are quick to identify and protest the things we don’t like in our society, but we are often asked “so what are you for?”
As revolutionaries we need to start building a new society in the shell of the old.
Gandhi said we should not wait for one to crumble before starting the other.
Constructive program brings people together to do the kind of community work that is empowering, bringing them to a point of self reliance and being ready to develop a new society.
To outline a nonviolent campaign involving all these elements, we need to begin to identify where the change is needed.…
When we talk about the “shell of the old” in the U.S., we can see with Hurricane Katrina that we are one hurricane away from being a third world country.
The structure is not working for people.
It is a façade that is only working for the people at the top.
The poverty, classism, and racism of our society was exposed by the winds and floods of Katrina.
Gandhi was working with a huge society of very poor people.
As we look at our nation of very poor and very rich people, the things that we identify as underlying our constructive program will be much different.
There is also the issues of who defines what the elements of a constructive program would look like in this society?
I think it is a continuous group process that needs to include those most in need of a new society, and those most interested in building one.
That is our challenge.
The NWTRCC newsletter is on-line, and has a lot of information about ’s strategy conference, among other things.
NWTRCC has also rereleased their “Peace Tax Return” that protesters can send in along with their tax returns if they want to let the IRS know why they’re upset.
If you’re working for a paycheck, the first step in resisting the income tax is to figure out how to stop your employer from withholding it in the first place.
To that end, NWTRCC has just released a flyer on how to control your federal income tax withholding by filing a W-4 form: While You Work… Stop Paying For War.
NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, also.
It includes reports from the national conference in Vegas and from the international conference in Germany, some stories from people who have been trying to pay their taxes directly to particular government agencies rather than into the U.S. Treasury via the IRS, and a timeline of one family’s battle with the IRS over a faulty “frivolous filing” penalty.
A new issue of NWTRCC’s More Than a Paycheck is out with articles on how to make the most of a tax levy, nationwide tax day demonstrations, tax law and court case updates, a remembrance of long-time war tax resister Cynthia Foster, a profile of tax resister Tim Pluta, and more.
The edition of More Than a Paycheck (NWTRCC’s newsletter) is out, with articles on the expanded frivolous filing penalty, actions, a review of Aaron Russo’s constitutionalist tax protester propaganda flick “America: Freedom to Fascism,” a report on the NWTRCC meeting, and an article by Ed Hedemann on “War Tax Resisting ‘Orphans’ ” — people who become war tax resisters on their own, without being persuaded by the war tax resistance movement or even (in some cases) knowing that there is such a movement.
I was such an “orphan” when I started.
The issue of NWTRCC’s More Than a Paycheck is out.
It includes articles on the following:
celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of NWTRCC
getting the perspectives of younger war tax resisters Lincoln Rice, Alice Liu, Sherill Crosby, R.J. Macani, and Lily Dalke
reporting on the New York City People’s Life Fund Gala
announcing the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in Newton, Kansas and the New England gathering
A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter — More Than a Paycheck — is out featuring an article I wrote about how to craft a persuasive and motivating tax resistance message.
(It’s a distillation of a Picket Line entry from .)
Also in the newsletter are some notes about IRS policy and foibles, an update on the ongoing attempts by war tax resister Daniel Jenkins to find a legal forum that will rule that conscientious objection to military taxation is a human right, and the latest on All Saints Church’s struggle to maintain its freedom of speech and its tax-exempt status at the same time.
“I suddenly woke up about five years ago and made a big sign that said ‘Does Our Lifestyle Demand War?’ and hung it on my door.”
Frances then proceeded to work at changing her lifestyle, starting by not using her car for two days a week.
As she walked more, she found she could use her car less and less — and liked walking more and more.
It became something of a meditation, with the added bonus of meeting people along the way.
She changed from a Friends Meeting that was some miles away to one within walking distance, and dropped her YMCA membership where they use so much heat and air conditioning.
She doesn’t want to fly anymore and takes the train instead.
She’s still working on many things, like buying food that is grown locally.
She’s really working to reduce her footprint on the planet, and at the same time redirecting taxes from war to funding real human needs like schools, peace and justice work, and rebuilding the new society in the shell of the old.
Some brief notes on the “economic stimulus” checks, frivolous filing warnings from the IRS that some war tax resisters have been receiving, the IRS’s expanded snitch payment program, limits on the IRS’s ability to seize pensions before they come due, and increasing IRS interest in offshore bank accounts
Some news about the status of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and about Joshua Goldberg’s war tax resistance in Canada
Notes from resisters, including Greg Reagle responding to critics who say that war tax resistance isn’t effective, Melissa Jameson relating stories about how her resistance relates to those around her, and a summary of the story of resister Charles Merrill
Some committee business including an announcement of the upcoming national meeting in Eugene, Oregon in and an invitation to readers to help shape the future direction of the War Tax Boycott project
“both daunting and encouraging and well worth the considerable reading time… captures in one indexed volume many individual acts and campaigns of conscientious objection to war and of revenue refusal to tyrannical governments… sincere voices and challenging arguments.”
“167 intelligent and intense writings on the challenging question of whether people of conscience should pay for war…
People struggling with this moral issue today will be guided by the writings in this book and may find some wonderful language to use in their own statements of conscience… a straightforward and compelling book.”
Some notes on frivolous filing warnings, new tax laws, and IRS enforcement techniques.
Notes about tax resisters Bob Williams, Mike Palecek, and David Schenck, about the trial of two Los Alamos National Laboratory protesters, and about the upcoming New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters.
A story about long-time resister Thomas Wilson.
The state of Massachusetts suspended his dental license 21 years ago when he stopped cooperating with state tax laws because the state, in turn, was acting as a collection agency for the IRS.
Wilson kept practicing dentistry without a license, and was able to keep doing so until this year when he was forced to shut down after a competing dentist ratted him out to the state board of registration.
At 75 Tom is philosophical about closing the door on his professional life and has no regrets about his choices.
“In this present economy we’re getting a payback for what the government has been doing and what I haven’t been paying for and resisting all this time.
People ask if war tax resistance changes anything.
I can’t say that, but it’s helped me put up with what we have to put up with in this country.”
Counseling notes including news about the new policy of allowing employers to give their employees tax-free bicycle commuting reimbursements, a reminder that if you’re given a summons to appear before the IRS you should ask for reimbursement of expenses, and a note about the “socially responsible” investment business Pax World Fund getting caught investing irresponsibly.
International News — an update on the case of Siân Cwper that I mentioned .
Apparently the British revenue department is playing some strange games with the members of the Peace Tax Seven.
(For more on the Peace Tax Seven, see this report on The Shrieking Violet.)
Ideas and Actions — including a report on tax resistance for same-sex marriage rights, a report from Ed Hedemann who spoke about war tax resistance with a class of seventh-graders, and a new NWTRCC-themed scarf (perfect for fundraising at winter demonstrations).
Notes about updated literature — including the booklet War Tax Resisters and the IRS which “gives a flow-chart style version of the risks of refusing to pay for war if the IRS notices.”
A call for fundraising help particularly to help promote Steev Hise’s upcoming war tax resistance documentary
Reflections and lessons learned by Becky Pierce — “I have been a war tax resister for the past 43 years, all of my adult working life…” This includes some useful information on IRS collection tactics, for instance how they go about hunting for assets to seize as the statute of limitations closes in and they start to get desperate.
An update on the legal taxable income baseline for and on how much income is exempt from IRS levies, a note about how some banks are charging exorbitant processing fees when they submit to a levy, and some other news about tax policy and enforcement changes.
News about a celebration of the Wally Nelson Centenary to be held in Massachusetts, brief notices of a few books that have been published recently by war tax resisters, some information on the activities of War Resisters International, and another call to order some fundraising message scarves while the weather cooperates.
Information about resources available to people promoting war tax resistance and/or the war tax boycott.
News, including an update about Steev Hise’s tax resistance film project, the new NWTRCC “Speaker’s Bureau”, a request for nominations for people to fill two seats on the NWTRCC administrative committee that will open in , and a call to begin a discussion on whether or not it would be a good idea for NWTRCC to endorse the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.
An update from a new war tax resister, John Parrish who, along with his wife Kate, dipped their toes into the tax resistance pool with a token $50 resistance.
They were surprised and alarmed when the IRS shark came for the toes and took the whole leg — assessing a $5,000 “frivolous filing” penalty on John and then another one on Kate!
With the help of the folks at NWTRCC, their Congressman, and “the IRS Legislative Advocates” they managed to get the fines removed.
John tells the story.
The debate about whether or not NWTRCC should endorse the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill was interesting.
Supporters of the bill tend to project their hopes for what they think such a bill ought to accomplish onto the actual bill that’s being proposed.
In doing so, they make claims for what the bill would do that are not supported by the bill’s actual substance.
But there was actually much less of this in the current debate than usual.
With one exception, even the supporters of the bill recognized that it is flawed and that it would not accomplish much of substance.
More remarkable to me were the number of people in the debate who said that they don’t support the bill or the “peace tax fund” idea in general, but who think that NWTRCC should go ahead and endorse it anyway so as to better preserve our good ties with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
The issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is now available on-line.
Among the features in this issue:
counseling notes on subjects like the taxability of credit card debt forgiveness as income, using the Freedom of Information Act to get information from the Internal Revenue Service, how levies against independent contractors work according to the law (though your clients may not realize it), and the cryptic IRS Letter #2645C
some letters-to-the-editor proposing actions war tax resisters can take, seeking pen pals, and announcing war tax resistance gatherings at the Georgia/Florida border and in Vermont
announcing resources related to the new War Tax Boycott year, and a new “Students and War” flyer
news about the upcoming national gathering, an almost-complete war tax resistance outreach film, and upcoming opportunities for outreach
“Relationships: When One is a WTR” — about “mixed marriages” in which one partner is a resister and the other one isn’t, and the challenges this can present.
There’s a short bit from me in this article, and a photo of me and my sweetie on the cover.
News about war tax resistance actions like the South-East gathering coming up in Georgia; outreach at the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking, the anarchist bookfares in Tacoma and Seattle, and the School of the Americas mobilization last month; and two upcoming nuclear weapons abolition events.
Notes about a new war tax resistance counselors’ packet, the case of long-time Maine resister Frank Donnelly (who may be facing jail time for his resistance), the possibility that health savings accounts may be levied for back taxes, and some notes about how tax liens affect your credit rating.
There’s a new issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter.
In this issue:
The lead story concerns Frank Donnelly, a war tax resister from Maine who pled guilty to tax evasion charges and is due to receive prison time.
It is rare for a war tax resister to face criminal charges.
In this case, Donnelly resisted by working in the underground economy and underreporting his income.
The IRS seems to be treating it as an ordinary tax evasion case.
International news including a note on the World Council of Churches policy on war tax resistance, war tax resistance in Canada, and the upcoming International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns in Norway .
Obits for recently-deceased war tax resisters Dennis Brutus, George Willoughby, and Lillian Willoughby.
notes and updates about the new health care bill, IRS enforcement tactics, taxpatriatism, the advantages of credit unions, and the criminal case against war tax resister Frank Donnelly
resource updates, including new brochures, a “penny poll” tutorial, the new War Resisters League pie chart, and reviews of the new Death and Taxes film
If you liked Liz Scranton’s profile, you’ll probably also like this account from a produce-addled wild-eyed hairy mountain man.
Both tell of lifestyle choices that go beyond tax resistance to a more radical reinvention of what it means to live a good life.
There’s a new issue of More Than a Paycheck out, full of news about the war tax resistance movement, including:
Rosenwald’s account was interesting, particularly that actual war tax resisters were few and far between at the conference (most countries were represented only by people working to enact some form of legal recognition for conscientious objection to military taxation, a la the Peace Tax Fund Act).
The United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain, was represented by a movement of civilly disobedient conscientious objectors as well.
I wonder why the Spanish resisters who have been so much in the news there didn’t show up on the radar at the conference.
Counseling Notes — how tax resisters can avoid getting preyed upon by “settle with the IRS for pennies on the dollar” companies; more “frivolous filing” overreach from the IRS; and increased use of IRS enforcement tactics isn’t leading to increased tax revenue
Many Thanks — to the generous donors who keep NWTRCC in business
Criminal Cases and Fear — Karl Meyer writes from the standpoint of decades of experience with war tax resistance about what factors increase the likelihood of criminal prosecution for war tax resistance. Larry Dansinger and Ruth Benn add two cents apiece.
War Tax Resisters in History — Ed Hedemann reviews some of his research into the U.S. government’s use of property seizures and criminal cases as tools against war tax resisters in the post-World War Ⅱ era
Resources — notes on the Death & Taxes DVD, the new “Thoreau and His Heirs: The History and the Legacy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience” study kit, and the NWTRCC fundraising scarves
NWTRCC News — a note on the upcoming national conference in Boston next month
An update on the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign.
This is an alternative fund to which war tax resisters can redirect their taxes.
It has a national focus and so is an alternative to the various regional alternative funds.
It was e.e. cummings, I used to love this when I was an early teenager about a conscientious objector [“i sing of Olaf glad and big”].
There was one line, “there is some shit I will not eat,” that reverberated in my social conscience since probably age 12.
There comes a point when there is something out there that we have to reject ultimately, and we have to throw ourselves on the wheel to stop it — even if the wheel devours us.
The boycott of taxes is so strong, so potentially powerful, that I guess I am urging other people to go forward without fear.
We are right.
War is wrong.
We are approaching the totalitarian state.
Take from them their finances, and we take their strength.
Eliminate the nexus between corporate wealth and industry and politics.
In this era there is so much to protest against, and tax is a very salient part of that.
A note about “frivolous filing” notices.
The IRS has gotten in the habit of responding to taxpayer protests with $5,000 frivolous filing penalties — even if the protests accompany a tax return that has been filled out correctly and legally.
What’s worse is that by the IRS’s rules, in order to appeal such a fine, you have to first pay it.
Peace activists have a resource of financial support when they accrue penalties for resisting taxes, participating in civil disobedience or in nonviolent direct action.
Through the PSC, the cost of a person’s or family’s penalty can be defrayed by almost 100%.
This is possible because a community of almost one hundred people have come together and committed to help each other with their fines.
A new edition of More Than a Paycheck,
NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line, and features the following:
A war tax resistance manifesto by Larry Rosenwald, and responses from Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Karl Meyer, and Bill Glassmire.
(I’ll have more on this in a future Picket Line entry… stay tuned.)
Buyer Beware, a poem on military spending by Marge Piercy
The IRS has gotten in the habit of sending out “frivolous filing” notices to anyone who writes them a letter explaining their reasons for tax resistance (or even in response to letters from non-resisters who are just paying under protest). These notices are accompanied by a $5,000 fine — a fine that, by law, must be paid before it can be appealed. The IRS is only authorized to assess such fines in response to a tax filing that is incomplete, inaccurate, and that involves some frivolous legal stance, so it is pretty clearly overstepping its bounds here: but because a resister must pay the fine in order to appeal it, and most war tax resisters are unwilling to do so, this puts them in a bind. One resister, Steve Leeds, got such a frivolous filing notice and then, instead of paying the fine and formally appealing it, he complained to his congressional representatives about the IRS’s abuse of the law. One of his representatives then contacted the IRS, which then caved — sending Leeds an apology.
If the IRS attaches a levy to your salary, it will leave you some portion of your salary to live on while it sucks away the rest. How does it determine how much to take? Is it based on your base salary, or on what’s left over in your check after deductions for 401(k) contributions, insurance premiums, commuter checks, or what have you? Turns out the answer is the latter, but only if those deductions were already in effect at the time the levy was received by the employer.
A book review of The Green Zone by Clare Hanrahan — this book looks at the environmental impact of the U.S. military, which is exempt from laws and treaties designed to protect the environment, and, according to the author, is “the largest single polluter of any single agency or organization in the world.”
War tax resistance ideas and actions, featuring a penny poll in Oregon, a protest in Washington D.C., and the upcoming New England gathering of war tax resisters.
NWTRCC News — a behind the scenes look into operations at NWTRCC headquarters.
Charles Carney reflects on his conversion to war tax resistance, partially motivated by the war tax resistance of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen in .
I have been able to divert over $100,000 away from the Boeings and the Halliburtons of the world to the Oxfams and Amnesty Internationals and Physicians for Social Responsibility and Harvesters of the world.
It all started for me with that very liberating idea of unilateral disarmament.
What a freeing thing to be able to lay down my sword and shield.
What a freeing thing to tell the government, to tell the military-industrial complex, to tell Wall Street: “No you can’t have my money.
All my checks will be written out to the people.
All my checks will be written out to the 99 percent; no more checks written out to the 1 percent.”
Notes about the IRS policy on salary levies and on employers who are willing to work with resisters to help them resist such levies, on banks versus credit unions, and on the effectiveness of scary letters from the IRS.
Information about the upcoming International Conference of War Tax Resisters and Peace Tax Campaigns, on the European Court of Human Rights case for conscientious objection to military taxation being pursued by Roy Prockter, and on a new director for the American peace tax fund promoting group.
A report from the 26th annual New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters.
Ed Hedemann’s proposal for “zombie war tax resistance,” in which he suggests that resisters prefill war-tax-refusing tax returns for several years in the future, and leave instructions for people to file them each year after your death.
“Why concede the ‘death’ part in that old saying about certainty?
Why give the government a break from having to deal with your resistance when you die?
What if there were a way to continue war tax resistance from the grave?”
An update on the case of imprisoned war tax resister Carlos Steward.
Notes on the new minimum income tax-free income levels, techniques for avoiding bank account levies, and how much of your money you can legally give away without IRS complications
International news including an article by the late Spanish war tax resister Pedro Otaduy
Action ideas including an outreach letter to community radio, a new blog, another war tax resistance legal appeal, and an election day penny poll
NWTRCC news including an announcement of the next national gathering (Chicago ), the new home of our email discussion list, a hunt for nominees to join the Administrative Committee, and a follow-up on those arrested in the civil disobedience action during the last national gathering in Kansas City
Beth Seberger tells how she became a war tax resister and why
The new blog mentioned above is MathewCh5v9, featuring writing by war tax resister Vickie Aldrich, largely reviewing letters from her father from when he was in a Civilian Public Service camp for drafted conscientious objectors during World War Ⅱ.
She has also addressed her own conscientious objection — war tax resistance — in some posts:
Counseling notes including information on the availability of low-income legal clinics to tax resisters, new estimates of the size of the underground economy and of the number of non-income-tax-paying households, and the IRS’s use of “ghost returns” when they battle non-filers.
International news from the Conscience Canada group of war tax resisters.
Ideas & Actions including a radio show sponsorship by a local war tax resistance group, an anti-census action in Britain, and Elizabeth Boardman’s evocation of John Woolman.
Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, was at Mount Holyoke college recently to address the more recent Wikileaks action and the government retaliation against accused whistleblower Bradley Manning. According to one account:
While in the area, Ellsberg said he planned to visit with Randy Kehler, an old friend and tax resister whose refusal to pay taxes led to a much-publicized confrontation with federal authorities that forced Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, from their Colrain home.
Ellsberg said he first heard Kehler speak at an anti-war, draft resisters event in when Kehler talked about being willing to go prison rather than go to war.
“He made a very strong impression on me,” Ellsberg said.
So strong, he said, that he got up and left.
“I went by myself to a men’s room at the back of the auditorium, just by myself, and sat there on the floor and cried.”
It was that moment, Ellsberg said, that he realized he would have to act on his own already strong feelings about the waste and folly of Vietnam.
Without Kehler’s example, he said, “I wouldn’t have copied the Pentagon Papers.”
War tax resisters Jack Herbert and S. Brian Willson appeared recently on the Veterans For Peace Forum:
Clare Hanrahan’s tax day speech:
“We must stop supporting this system of destruction.
Not merely because it is immoral and unjust, but because it is illegal — according to International Law.”
counseling notes — Congress considers revoking passports from tax delinquents, the IRS struggles to cope with a flood of tax fraud, and Ed Hedemann suggests low-income tax resisters inflate the numbers on their income tax statements so they have something to resist.
international news — tax resistance in Spain, and a new nonviolent campaign guide from War Resisters’ International
legal news — updates on the Frank Donnelly and Cindy Sheehan cases
action reports and photos
reports from the NWTRCC national gathering in Chicago
Some updates on the prospects of passport restrictions for tax resisters, consequences of the laws implementing Obamacare for tax resisters, challenges in being a phone tax resister, and how non-filers can navigate the food stamp program.
International news about the upcoming international war tax resistance conference, and a quashed legal appeal by a German conscientious objectors’ group against mandatory military taxation.
Glimpses at the state of war tax redirection funds, an upcoming () New England war tax resisters’ gathering, some war tax resisters who got shout-outs in a Mennonite Women publication, and an update on the Cindy Sheehan case.
Organizational news including an announcement of the thirtieth anniversary of NWTRCC’s founding, a note about the national gathering coming up in Colorado Springs, and about NWTRCC’s presence at the School of the Americas Watch protests in .
A profile of Seth Berner, who has been resisting a token protest amount of his taxes for 20 years.
The latest issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is now on-line.
It’s a special edition, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the committee.
current events in tax resistance including a Pacific Yearly Meeting fund to help tax resisting Quakers, innovations in tax resistance in Spain, and the implications of Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” comment
ideas and actions including the Afghan Peace Volunteers group, a recent talk radio broadcast about war tax resistance, an on-line penny poll, and updates on a recent Plowshares action and on the Iran Pledge of Resistance
upcoming evens like the NWTRCC national gathering next month in Colorado, the New England regional gathering later this month in Massachusetts, the School of the Americas action in November, and next year’s international war tax resistance conference
some movement news including impressions from the School of the Americas Watch annual vigil, updates about war tax resisters who ran for office in the last elections, news about war tax resisters who have participated in anti-drone civil disobedience actions, and a mention of the recent New England war tax resistance regional gathering
A bunch happened while I was away and I’m only just getting caught up.
Here’s the highlight reel:
The IRS has been pursuing war tax resister Cindy Sheehan for months, and not long ago they hauled her into court to try to get a judge to order her to cough up financial information they could use against her. She fought back, with help from NWTRCC and its legal advisor. The IRS has apparently thrown in the towel! Sheehan posted to her blog a letter she got from the agency in which it informs her that they have withdrawn their summons.
Some notes on the taxable income baseline, how to adjust your withholding as a new employee, and the latest news on the telephone excise tax resistance front.
A “Pull the Pork” protester outside of the Washington, D.C. headquarters of military contractor Lockheed Martin
A coalition of groups have organized a “Pull the Pork (from the Pentagon)” national day of action to try to point out that the sacred cow of Pentagon spending is really a pricey pig in a poke.
Levante profiles ecological and antimilitarist activist Francesc García Barberà, who was involved in the Spanish struggle for the recognition of conscientious objection to military service, and in its war tax resistance movement. Excerpts (my translation):
As a conscientious objector, García Barberà performed alternative service in the Barrio del Cristo, where he became involved in the Workers’ Catholic Action Brotherhood, to which he remains linked, as with the objector movement.
“The objection is in all of life; it’s not only not doing military service, but it’s rethinking the role of the Army and of military spending.
The movement did not end when objection was legalized nor when conscription was abolished,” he notes.
Today he is associated with pacifist groups, never fails each year to make a symbolic assault on the NATO base in Bétera, and practices tax resistance, like a handful of Alaquàsers of his generation.
“We omit the percentage that we estimate is dedicated to military spending (between 7% and 12%) and redirect it to Caritas or some NGO,” he explains, which on some occasions has meant conflict with the Treasury Department.
“Armies defend borders when what ought to be defended is a dignified life for people.
And even if they are dressed up as humanitarian actions, they serve large vested interests.
In a war the strongest wins, not the most just,” he says.
notes on a seeming IRS capitulation in the Cindy Sheehan case, the prospects for war tax resistance communities, and the scoop on Social Security levies
ideas and actions such as marching war tax resisters in Austin, next Fall’s New England Regional Gathering, and a call for more fraud in military spending
news about the upcoming May NWTRCC national gathering in Asheville, North Carolina
Redirection: Our “Constructive Program” — Bill Ramsey compares redirection (the common practice in war tax resistance circles of giving your due taxes to charity rather than to the government) to the “constructive program” part of Gandhi’s campaigns.
Like us! — Erica Weiland points out the various facets of NWTRCC’s social media presence.
Counseling Notes — how credit rating worries and student debt may discourage war tax resisters; suspicions of an uptick in the underground economy; lots of bad news for the IRS; and war tax resistance counselor training notes
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — a recap of some of the creative outreach and protest actions of the nationwide war tax resistance community
How We Want Our Tax Dollars Used — a look at the granting decisions of a handful of war tax resistance alternative funds, which coordinate the redirection of many war tax resisters
NWTRCC News — a recap of the NWTRCC national gathering in Asheville earlier this month
Notes about an especially aggressive IRS levy of Social Security payments, and about the agency’s retreat from its overzealous infliction of “frivolous filing” penalties on people who added messages of protest to their tax forms
A note about an Independence Day war tax protest at which IRS forms went up in flames, and about pioneering war tax resister Juanita Nelson’s 90th birthday
Some resources that would be appropriate for the upcoming “Nuclear Free Future Month”
News about the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering and the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters
V. Schneider’s take on the ramifications of the Affordable Care Act for war tax resisters.
I’ve shared some of my experiences with the Act’s provisions as a low-income, return-filing resister here at The Picket Line.
Ms. Schneider writes about the challenges of the Act from the perspective of a resister who does not file returns, and therefore has no clear way of proving that she qualifies for the Act’s insurance subsidies.
Schneider has some helpful recommendations for non-filling resisters who cannot afford non-subsidised insurance.
Some notes on the new federal standard deduction and personal exemption amounts for the upcoming tax year, on the new IRS program that allows you to download some of the files the agency keeps on you, on a new website that keeps track of the legal aspects of alternative currencies, and on the troubles of the increasingly overwhelmed and under-budgeted IRS.
Some war tax resistance news, including a report of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day war tax resistance display at a recent anti nuclear weapons protest, a mention of some recent honors given to war tax resisters Robin Harper and Joanne Sheehan, and a brief note on the conviction and jailing of Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak.
You can find more about the Olejak case in this recent article from the Times-Union.
Olejak is spending several consecutive weekends in prison, and has agreed (in a plea bargain) to partially and incrementally pay the $242,684 the IRS says he owes since he stopped paying in .
The group is looking for people who want to serve on its Administrative Committee.
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund — which helps to reimburse any penalties and interest seized from a war tax resister by the government — is now under new management.
The next NWTRCC national gathering is scheduled for and will be held in San Diego, California.
Robin Harper reflects on the development of “redirection” as a war tax resistance tactic: “I think it is fair to say that the essence and origins of the very widespread practice today of WTRs conscientiously redirecting their refused taxes into channels of constructive activism, community building, and addressing human needs, can be traced to [his own case in] .”
There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
a look back at the life and work of Juanita Nelson with contributions from Bob Bady, Karl Meyer, Ginny Sсhnеider, Ed Hedemann, Lori Barg, and Ed Agro
some notes about trends in tax enforcement including IRS levies on royalty income, the sudden decline in property seizures for the past 15 years, phone tax resistance, and Elizabeth Boardman’s attempt to get some respect for war tax resistance in the courts
a note about the passing of Dirk Panhuis, who had been active with Conscience and Peace Tax International
some updates about war tax resisters Julia Butterfly Hill and Joseph Olejak, the Spring Rising anti-war action, Greg Wise’s mouthing off about tax refusal, and the Mennonite Central Committee’s war tax redirection program
news about tax day outreach on social media, at the U.S. Social Forum, at the Jewish Voice for Peace conference, and the Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship
Members of the Bijou Community were already involved in war tax resistance when Peter and Mary arrived.
Early on, money was held in common, but that evolved over the years to each doing their own thing.
One year the community did a tax protest and filed a 1040 saying they didn’t want to pay anything “because we don’t want to support the war.”
That seemed to trigger an audit, which took an exhausting six months of collecting receipts to convince the IRS that members were not living off donations that came in for the soup kitchen and houses of hospitality.
“The IRS said don’t file like that anymore because it messes up our system, and we said don’t audit us anymore because it messes up ours!”
David Hartsough is a Quaker and a War Tax Resister who has for decades been redirecting a large portion of his “tax obligations,” believing that if war is abolished, “humanity can not only survive and better address the climate crisis and other dangers, but will be able to create a better life for everyone.
The reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination.”
(Editor’s note: The 2016 U.S. budget for past, present, and future wars is $1,300 billion.)
He cofounded the Nonviolent Peaceforce, inspired in part by Gandhi’s idea of a shanti sena, a peace army, and this organization is now active in 40 countries, stationing trained professional peaceworkers in conflict areas around the globe and is sustained by an $8 million budget.
He works with World Beyond War and is currently executive director of Peaceworkers in San Francisco.
Waging Peace has been in the works for 27 years.
Ruth Benn reflects on “The Mysterious Ways of the IRS” — the agency seems arbitrary and unpredictable at times in the ways it responds to war tax resisters.
The three activists who boldly broke through security at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in have had their sabotage convictions reversed on appeal and are no longer being imprisoned.
One article about their successful appeal concluded:
“They are still obligated to pay the government a fine of $52,953 for the break-in at Y-12.
But they took vows of poverty decades ago, don’t have bank accounts, and have neither the means nor the intention of paying it.”
The War Tax Talk blog has reprinted an op-ed debate that was published in the Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts back in .
It features Juanita Nelson dueling with a U.S. Air Force Reserve Lieutenant-Colonel over the question: “Is it ever right to refuse, on principle, to pay taxes?”
Some news of interest to war tax resisters in particular:
C.J. Hinke has a book coming out: Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison. Here’s an excerpt.
You can also follow the PrisonWarResisters blog which contains a lot of good accounts of mid-twentieth-century conscientious objection in the United States.
The entries touch on war tax resistance from time to time, mostly in passing, but include information about the tax resistance stands of Juanita & Wally Nelson, Ernest & Marion Bromley, Eroseanna Robinson, Karl Meyer, and Art Harvey.
The Spanish anti-militarist group “Tortuga” has created a comic book to explain why and how to refuse to pay war taxes.
War tax resisters have been making the tactic known hither and yon, including at a Fellowship of Reconciliation regional conference, a Fourth-of-July parade, a “People’s Budget” gathering, and the U.S. Social Forum; also, the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters is coming up in .
Notes about IRS-impersonation scam phone calls, and how to calculate penalties & interest on unpaid federal taxes.
International News with notes about tax resistance in Spain, Burundi, and Honduras.
Domestic war tax resistance news including an announcement of the upcoming New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters, a note about Ron Paul’s new call for tax resistance to combat American imperialism, skepticism about the “United States Institute of Peace,” and notes from the recent Mennonite Church USA convention.
Counseling Notes, including an early warning on those transportation bill provisions, news that the IRS will no longer levy SSA disability insurance benefits, notes on what happens when the IRS disputes the numbers on your W-4 form, and what happens when the IRS sends a notice to an address you no longer live at.
A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out, with content including:
Jason Rawn shows how war tax resistance can fit into a campaign of climate-oriented divestment.
Sue Barnhart memorializes the recently passed war tax resister Peg Morton.
International news concerning peace tax fund promoters in London, a global campaign on military spending congress in Berlin, and war tax resisters doing direct action at a barracks in Bilbao.
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.
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.
A new issue of
NWTRCC’s
newsletter is out, with content including:
Announcements about the upcoming New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters and of Campaign Nonviolence’s Action Week, along with commentary on tax day actions and the recent Shut Down Creech camp.
I’m through with symbolic, feelgood, bumper-sticker activism; I’ve taken Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t a-Marchin’ Anymore to heart and I’ve left the “peace parade” marches and rallies with their tired chants and terrible speakers behind.
I take a practical approach, learning about the tax laws and about how to live well by being down-to-earth and sensibly frugal.
How do I feel about my life now that I’ve gone from a $100,000-a-year urban playboy lifestyle to living on around $12,000?
Money Magazine profiled me briefly, for an article they put out on how to avoid paying taxes.
They concluded that their readers probably wouldn’t enjoy what they called the “ascetic lifestyle” that comes along with my technique.
If this is “asceticism,” asceticism is very underrated.
The life I’m leading now is fuller and more enjoyable than ever; I have less anxiety (and less guilt about my taxes) and I feel like I have integrity, and I’m genuinely living a life of abundance.
For one thing, by being willing to take in less income, I am able to work fewer hours.
It turns out that those free hours are much more valuable than the money for which I’d been trading them (and the more practice I get in living vigorously, the more valuable my free time becomes to me).
Now, more of what I do with my life is for goals I think are valuable, useful, and interesting; much less is what I have to put up with for a paycheck.
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy for abundance and fulfillment.
But what I’ve learned is that by taking a more direct responsibility for your life and your effect on the world, by radically reassessing how your activities relate to your priorities, and by backing away from the consumer and job cultures, you can make your own life better and reduce your complicity in making other people’s lives suck.
Some movement news including a report from the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters & Supporters, and Erica Weiland’s report back from the School of the Americas Watch Border Convergence at Nogales.
Jordan Cooper speculates about the possibility of using blockchain techniques (a la bitcoin) to create a self-enforcing escrow account that people could deposit their taxes into such that the money would only be released to the government when certain conditions / demands were met: Blockchain Based Tax Resistance a.k.a. “Resistcoin”
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the big three credit rating companies — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — will begin to remove tax-lien and civil-judgment data from credit reports starting around .
This is designed in part to address the problem of inaccuracies in the reports used by rating companies.
The data will be removed if it does not include a complete list of at least three data points: a person’s name, address and either a social security number or date of birth.
This will improve scores for many consumers, or “expand debt access” as the jargon goes.
Many war tax resisters may be among those who see their scores improve.
Some readers may question whether “widening the credit box” is a good thing or not, but others may find welcome benefits.
A look at some of the unfriendly-feedback in the depths of the comments section on recent media commentaries about tax resistance.
brief notes about issues of interest to tax resisters, including: the private debt collection companies that the IRS has deputized to collect taxes, and how to do war tax resistance counseling in a “nondirective” way
updates from the NWTRCC field organizer, and a note from new anti-Trump tax resister Andrew Newman
Notes on issues for war tax resisters crossing the border, glitches with the latest tax bill, the difficulty in understanding IRS interest rates, new estate tax exemption limits.
Advice on starting a local war tax resistance support group, writing letters of protest to the IRS, and a review of “Walden: The Video Game.”
Ilene Roizman tells us of her recent decision to begin to resist and redirect her taxes.
While I’ve been delving through the archives of Gospel Herald, links have been backing up in my bookmarks.
Here are some that concern war tax resistance in the here-and-now:
The Trump administration has decided it enjoys provoking trade wars, which perhaps have the blessing of distracting them from getting their jollies by provoking real wars.
But the prime mechanism — tariffs — is also a revenue source for the government.
Which leads war tax resisters like Lincoln Rice to ask, are these tariffs for war? and if so, what can war tax resisters do about it?
Thirty-Eight Years of Refusal — Erica Leigh, Georgia Pearson, Larry Bassett, and Bill Ramsey review the history of the recently-closed Conscience and Military Campaign Escrow Account, which was responsible for coordinating tens of thousands of dollars in war tax redirection.
Counseling Notes — News about government policies towards war tax resisters, including the use of private debt collectors, IRS summonses, passport revocations, and a sharp decline in levies.
Colrain After 25 Years — A 25th Anniversary celebration of the actions surrounding the Corner/Kehler house seizure, coinciding with the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters.
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — Including the Maine War Tax Resistance Gathering, and obituary notices for war tax resisters Ray Gingerich and Naomi Paz Greenberg.
NWTRCC News — Including an announcement of the NWTRCC national gathering in Cleveland.
Adrienne Maree Brown writes about her war tax resistance in the wake of a wage levy, and reflects on the disadvantages of going it alone as opposed to resisting as part of a supportive group. Excerpt:
i still deeply agree with the politics that led to this action, but i know now that i didn’t do it the right way.
i acted as an individual, as if my singular act of rage should be respected, as if it could have meaningful impact on the systems of oppression that lead to the military spending i want to divest from.
it helped me sleep well at night, but it wasn’t tied into a collective strategy, a system of accountability around whether it was effective.
someday i hope to be part of larger direct action efforts around debt and taxes, but from this struggle i have learned in a most personal way the importance of the collective.
Is there a war tax resistance movement?
According to a pseudonymous author in a back issue of Conscience (the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign), “War tax resistance is real, but the war tax resistance movement is fiction.”
War tax resistance is a tactic, says the author, whereas movements coalesce around goals, so there will never be a war tax resistance movement, though there may be movements that incorporate war tax resistance.
Erica Leigh looks back at the Beit Sahour tax strike as it was covered at the time, in a two-part series of excerpts from Conscience (part 1 and part 2).
Leigh writes: “The tax resistance in Beit Sahour was due to a high level of community cohesion, organization, education, and solidarity, something that’s missing from our scattered war tax resistance organizing around the United States.
Most of our finest moments in US war tax resistance arose from such concentrated and dedicated efforts in a small geographic region, even when the total number of resisters was small.
Food for thought!”
TaxProf Blog gives a fascinating overview of the bureaucratic morass the IRS slogs through even on a good day, when it’s not shut down.
There are multiple oversight bodies and committees all demanding that the agency do this or that, and obsolete laws demanding that it collect irrelevant data.
It’s a wonder they can get anything done.
Some notes about the new Qualified Business Income deduction, the IRS budget request, tax evasion of “gig economy” workers, the ongoing fake-IRS phone scam, and the difficulty of resisting tariffs.
Some ideas and resources to help you with your outreach.
Announcements on the death of Joffre Stewart, a memorial service for Tom Wilson, the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in D.C., and stats about NWTRCC’s social media presence.
A new initiative launched with a splash in Catalonia under the name Ni 1 euro x a la repressió (“Not one euro for repression”).
Modeled on the Spanish war tax resistance movement, it is urging people to redirect the taxes that would otherwise go to pay for the Spanish monarchy, the judiciary and state prosecutor, and the internal security services.
The aim is to stop financial support for the Spanish suppression of Catalan independence.
The website is splashy, and its interactive how-to-resist page in particular seems worth emulating by other similar resistance campaigns.
The epidemic of destruction of automated traffic ticket machines along the roadways of France continues. According to the latest figures, government revenue from these cameras has dropped dramatically.
The government believes it has lost €660 million in expected ticket revenue so far, and that’s in addition to the costs to repair or replace the damaged machines.
The rich already pay high tax rates. The tax code is already progressive.
I hear this all the time from right- and neoliberal-leaning tax blogs and
think tanks. This is usually followed by some graph or statistic showing
that “the top” n% of taxpayers (by adjusted gross income or
some other declared income measure) pay 90% of income taxes, or something
like that: Q.E.D.
But this is sleight-of-hand. To show that the tax rates are
progressive isn’t enough. To make the case that the rich are paying “their
share” of income taxes you have to also demonstrate that they are paying
those rates on all of their income, not just on that portion of income they
haven’t managed to shelter from taxation. So, in this regard, I was
interested in this new paper on
Tax Evasion and Inequality.
It took advantage of a tax haven data leak, and existing records of tax
audits in Scandinavia, to get a snapshot of how the very wealthy avoid
having much of their assets subjected to taxation in the first place. They
may pay high rates on what’s left over, but that isn’t the same as paying
high rates in the first place. “[W]e find that the 0.01 percent richest
households evade about 25 percent of their taxes. By contrast, tax evasion
detected in stratified random tax audits is less than 5 percent throughout
the distribution.”
There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter
out, with content that includes:
Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
Some notes on recent trends in tax enforcement, including frivolous fines, wage garnishment, audit rates of the poor, state-and-local tax deduction limits, and cooperation between tax enforcers in the U.S. and Canada.
According to the details of the newish law concerning passports and tax
scofflaws, when the amount of someone’s overdue taxes rises above a certain
threshold ($52,000 last I checked), the
IRS
must notify the State Department, whereupon the State Department
must not issue a new passport to that scofflaw or renew their existing
passport (unless the scofflaw is taking certain specified steps to pay up or
contest the tax debt), and may revoke any existing passport that
person has.
That’s all the law allows for. It does not specify under what circumstances the
State Department should revoke existing passports, or even mandate that they do
so at all. It is merely an option. Now it emerges that the
IRS hopes
to put more teeth into that provision on its own initiative. It plans to send
requests to the State Department, on a case-by-case basis, asking State to
revoke the passports from people the
IRS
believes might thereby be prodded into paying what they owe.
This process is not something that was explicitly authorized by the law, but
TIGTA
didn’t seem to think that was a problem. “There is no law or regulation that
directly authorizes the
IRS to
prioritize taxpayers to be referred to the State Department for revocation;
however, we believe it is reasonable for the
IRS to
provide the State Department with taxpayers for possible revocation to comply
with the law.”
Recent news and links of note:
Tax resistance has played a role in the Hong Kong protest movement:
Rogge shares some of her tactics for reducing the effectiveness of
IRS
reprisals (excerpt):
The IRS has seized my car and checking account funds and has repeatedly levied my wages.
My strategy has been to work several jobs, so that if a permanent levy were placed on my wages at one work-place, I could either reduce my hours at that job or quit and still have a backup job.
When I’ve had the money, I’ve paid rent, health insurance, and food bills in advance.
The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues.
In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week.
The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government.
In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province.
They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
Some links that have floated through my facemask in recent days:
Thousands of IRS Employees Are Currently Home With Pay, But Not Working is the sort of headline that brings a smile to my face.
The gist of the accompanying article is that most of the IRS workforce has been sent home to avoid infecting one another at the office, but only a minority of the employees are equipped to work from home.
The rest continue to collect paychecks, but have nothing to do.
People are travelling less, commuting less, and shipping less. As a result, people are burning less motor vehicle fuel, and as a result large drops in gasoline excise tax revenue are expected.
The hashtag #RebeliónFiscal is trending on the Twitter, as small business owners in Argentina plot a tax strike.
The business owners are upset that the government has offered them no tax relief as business activity has gone into an epidemic-induced slump.
They’re joined by antiauthoritarian activists and by the general public, who are throwing coordinated cacerolazos (noisy pot-and-pan banging protests) from the windows of their apartments as they remain sequestered.
Now, while mostly at home, we find plenty of things to do, but running out to a big demonstration is not one of them.
This got me thinking about war tax resistance as a perfect protest for the isolated.
That led me to think of the many individual acts of resistance in antiwar history and thus to Ammon Hennacy and his “one man revolution.”
Some links that have bubbled up in my browser over the past few weeks as I’ve been on my Brethren binge:
Businesses in Chattanooga, Tennesseee held a one-day strike in support of #BlackLivesMatter, as a way to withhold sales tax dollars in order to pressure the city government to redirect funding from the police department to less-nefarious uses.
American war tax resister Ed Agro has died.
Agro was one of the founders of the New England War Tax Resistance regional group, and was also the admin behind the wtr-s war tax resistance email list.
Richard Yoder responds in a letter: “I am grateful that there seems to be a renewed emphasis on the historic peace witness of the Mennonite tradition, including war-tax resistance and redirecting of our tax dollars to life-giving activities. The nature of warfare has changed from the past when the military needed our bodies to now needing our dollars to pay for high-tech warfare. So in the same way Mennonites in the past found a way to say no to participating in war through conscientious objection, we now need to do the same with our tax dollars.”
A Glasgow man whose apartment keeps getting flooded has accused the city of negligence for signing off on the building’s construction, and is refusing to pay his council tax as a pressure tactic.
Kay Bell, at Don’t Mess with Taxes, reports on how the IRS’s fleet of private debt collection companies tangled with the wrong guy. The victim, who did not actually owe the IRS anything (his debts had been discharged in bankruptcy), sued the debt collectors for illegal harassment and won.
Neighbors of a homeless encampment in a park in Vancouver are threatening to withhold their taxes to pressure the government to do something about it.
The Vancouver Sun painted this as a NIMBY-hostility-to-the-homeless issue, but one of the neighbors took to Twitter to explain that they’re trying to pressure the government not to act against the homeless encampment, but in assistance of those who live there.
As I reported back in July the IRS was refusing to issue stimulus payments to people in prison, and was trying to claw back the payments it had already issued — even though the law did not authorize the agency to do these things.
Now a court has granted an injunction against the IRS, ordering it to release the funds to the unjustly robbed prisoners.
The human revolt against traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taking casualties from rebels armed with spray paint, an angle grinder, and hot tar in Canada and France in recent weeks.
The IRS is still (improperly) threatening people with frivolous filing penalties if they send letters of protest along with their tax returns.
The new QR-codes that the IRS has started to include on past-due notices present a possible security issue for some tax resisters.
An appeals court affirmed that you cannot discharge federal tax debt in bankruptcy if you have willfully “attempted in any manner to evade or defeat” the tax.
The IRS has announced that not only will it issue stimulus payments and Paycheck Protection Program loans to people and businesses even if those people or businesses are behind on their taxes, but also that the agency will not levy bank accounts into which those payments are deposited — for 24 weeks in the case of PPP loans, or 8 weeks in the case of stimulus payments.
Current IRS policy says that agents should contact taxpayers before issuing a levy to ask whether the account in question recently received such a payment.
If so, they are supposed to refrain from levying until the proper number of weeks have passed.
If the IRS tries to levy a bank account in which you have recently deposited such a check, you can protest this and the IRS is supposed to release the levy.
In either case, this should give you plenty of time to empty out the account so that a future levy attempt will fail.
I fear that waiting out the ten year statute of limitations on collections is becoming a reasonable strategy and that many “taxpayers” have caught on and that the IRS, when it comes to collection, is to a significant degree bluffing.
My overall takeaway from the [recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] report is that the IRS has a lot of outstanding receivables that it does nothing about.
That made me want to look more closely at the numbers.
Working with the spreadsheets is a little frustrating.
They don’t answer all the questions I would like answered, but it does give a pretty clear idea that the IRS is something of a shadow of its former self.
At , the balance of assessed tax, penalties and interest (ATPI) was $114.2 billion spread among 10.4 million accounts.
In that year IRS filed 1,096,376 notices of federal tax lien and requested 3,606,818 levies on third party.
IRS wrote off $14.6 billion that had expired due to the ten year statute.
At ATPI was $125.8 billion spread among 11.2 million accounts.
There were 543,604 liens and 782,735 levies.
$34.2 billion expired due to the ten year statute.
It is important to remember that when we are talking about collections, we are talking about tax that has already been assessed.
This has nothing to do with people who have not filed or who underreported income and have not gotten caught.
That is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Through my decades of tax practice, the notion of flat out not paying assessed tax was not something that was in my bag of tricks.
It has slowly dawned on me that this is a thing.
A tax strike by restaurants and bars in Italy has begun.
The strike is being organized by Movimento Imprese Ospitalità, which is a project of the tourist industry branch of the General Confederation of Italian Industry.
It is protesting continued tax collection at a time of collapsing business during the Covid pandemic.
I’ve seen a few more articles that give some additional details about the latest tax strike in South Kivu:
The campaigns have been organized and led by what are vaguely referred to as “la société civile” (civil society).
This refers to some sort of preexisting groups, but I don’t really understand what they are.
They seem to be non-governmental organizations that sometimes behave as parallel governments or service providers, other times as sorts of citizens’ unions or chambers of commerce.
Guillermo Incer Medina, in Confidencial, evaluates the tactics used by the protesters in Nicaragua who have been struggling with the Ortega regime.
He concludes that the best high-impact, low-risk action would be tax resistance from a small number of large-scale taxpayers.
Excerpt:
In Nicaragua, 94% of the total tax collection comes from large taxpayers (a large taxpayer is a company that has large volumes of transactions and, therefore, that collects taxes such as VAT, IR — and others– in large amounts.
Examples of these could be supermarket chains, large importers, large commercial establishments, or large agro-industrial consortia).
In our country, the sectors with the largest taxpayers are industry, commerce, finance, transportation, and services.
In these sectors, large taxpayers collect more than 90% of the total taxes of their respective sector (which is to say that of every 100 córdobas that is collected from taxes in each sector, 90 córdobas are contributed by large taxpayers and only 10 córdobas by mid-sized and small ones).
Furthermore, in areas such as liquors, beers, soft drinks, and fuel, the large taxpayers collect 100% of the total taxes.
Why is this important?
Because the dictatorship needs taxes to maintain its repressive apparatus and its patronage politics.
If you take the oxygen out of their horror machine and purchase of consciences, you take away their room for maneuver.
“Let’s do a consumer strike!” said COSEP and AMCHAM representatives every time we demanded a national strike.
This is a mistake for two reasons: 1) for a consumer strike to have a real and not symbolic effect, requires that millions of unorganized Nicaraguans, including pro-government people, decide to deprive themselves of consuming goods that are difficult for them to obtain due to the precarious living conditions in which we live, 2) it is useless for us to stop consuming (not paying VAT) if companies still pay the State taxes such as IR and others (one must keep in mind that those who directly “deliver” taxes to the State are not we the consumers, but they are the collectors — the companies).
What can one do then?
The action that could have the greatest impact at the lowest cost and in the shortest term is tax resistance from the large taxpayers, which is nothing more than the large companies stopping payment of taxes to the dictatorship for a period long enough to oblige them to make concessions for his departure.
“They are going to close us down!”, the big businesses say immediately.
But it is not likely that the government will close large companies due to how this would look to foreign investment, and due to the political cost of sending thousands of people into the streets.
Furthermore, if they close large companies, this would in practice have the same effect as tax resistance, since they would stop receiving their taxes.
“We are exposing thousands to unemployment!”, they also say… more jobs are being jeopardized by letting this political and humanitarian crisis drag on and by the coming interruption of CAFTA and ADA, if the dictatorship continues to do what it wants and stays five more years.
“It’s too risky!”
It is more risky to put your body on the line in a march or a roadblock, or to go on a hunger strike in a church and get shot, cut off your services, and imprison those who want to help you.
There is no large, medium, or small company that is worth more than a human life.
Tax resistance is more feasible than other actions of high-risk and low-impact (such as a chain of express pickets or coordinated sit-ins) because it does not require the coordination of thousands of unorganized people.
To promote tax resistance, it is enough that a few of the largest companies, which are already organized in chambers, agree, stand firm, and coordinate among themselves.
Gig workers in Serbia used to be more or less income-tax free, apparently.
Not any more. A new law not only makes them liable for income tax, but requires them to cough up taxes for the last five years.
Marchers in Belgrade protested the new tax law.
Long-time war tax resisters Arcadi Oliveres and David Zarembka have died.
Oliveres was one of the founders of the modern war tax resistance movement in Spain, while Zarembka was one of those who helped NWTRCC get off the ground in the United States, serving as its first treasurer.
More info:
Chuck Faber’s tribute to David Zarembka on A Friendly Letter, including autobiographical writings from Zarembka himself that go into his five decades of war tax resistance in detail
In my last update I noted that the city government of Vic had decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead sending those taxes to the independence-minded Catalan government.
Vic has now been joined by Girona, capital of Girona province, as well as some other medium-sized towns.
The U.S. State Department can refuse to give you a passport or can revoke your existing passport if the IRS tells them you’re way behind on your taxes and aren’t doing anything about it.
And the IRS can make this happen just by notifying the State Department.
Is that unconstitutional? To take away your fundamental right to travel without due process of law?
Paul L. Caron, at TaxProf Blog, investigates the issue and a recent test case that did a poor job of trying to test it in Tax Court.
Caron doesn’t think the constitutionality argument will work, even if it is raised more competently in a more receptive legal forum.
For one thing, the right of an American citizen to travel internationally is not very well protected by American law: the courts do not consider it to be all that important.
For that reason, the courts’ threshold for what they consider sufficient “due process” to deprive you of such a right is pretty low.
President Biden has now come out and said explicitly what had been suspected: that he hopes to help fund his spending spree by increasing IRS enforcement spending, as part of a sock-it-to-big-business plan that also includes increasing corporate tax rates, broadening the corporate tax base, and eliminating big business loopholes.
We’ll have to keep an eye on this as it burbles through the legislative tract.
There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out.
Contents include reports on this year’s “tax day” actions, a report back from the recent NWTRCC national conference, and some memories of recently-deceased war tax resisters Dave Zarembka & Gladys Kamonya.
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.
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.
IRS Circumvents “Statute of Limitations” by Ruth Benn.
Normally, the IRS has ten years to collect unpaid taxes from you before they have to give up.
Also, normally, if you decide to voluntarily pay your taxes, you can also decide for which tax year you are paying them, and by IRS policy, they’ll respect that.
Ruth Benn’s tax resistance takes the form of refusing to pay her income tax, but voluntarily paying her self-employment tax.
As the ten year statute of limitations approached on one of her unpaid years of income tax, the IRS tried to pull a fast one and used some sleight-of-hand to apply the money Benn was paying for the current year’s self-employment tax to the expiring year’s income tax amount.
She is hoping to get the agency to change its mind and to respect its own policy, and promises to keep us up to date on how the red tape tangles.
Counseling Notes.
Including a reminder that Social Security levies can continue past the ten-year statute of limitations date because the levy is considered “continuous” when it is first applied (not reapplied with each new Social Security check).
Democrats are keen to force banks to report how much their customers have put into and taken out of their accounts each year.
They hope this will bring to the surface some of the money in the underground economy that the government has been frustrated when trying to tax.
This proposal has gotten a lot of pushback, and has been an on-again / off-again part of the budget package currently oozing through Congress.
The latest guesswork suggests that the Democrats may reactivate the proposal but restrict it to accounts with $10,000 or more in them.
There’s a nice website that’s been established by the caretakers of The Nelson Homestead — the modest home of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
It has good recaps of the lives and activism of the Nelsons, including photos.
The Biafra Nations League, which is trying to establish a break-away nation more representative of the Igbo people, has issued an ultimatum to oil firms in the area, ordering them to stop paying taxes to Cameroon and Nigeria, which currently claim sovereignty over the region.
Argentina legalized abortion .
Now a group of Argentine legislators have proposed a law that would permit a sort of conscientious objection to taxpayer-involvement in abortion, of a similar sort to what is proposed in the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act” in the U.S.
The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taken out of service by human rebels in the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany & France in recent weeks.
Some links of interest:
The council tax resistance campaign that is part of the opposition to the Edmonton Incinerator has so far attracted eleven tax resisters.
As previously reported, the version of the “Build Back Better Act” passed by the House did not include a feared provision that would require banks to report to the IRS about more of their customers’s accounts and transactions.
There was a long-shot chance that those provisions would reappear in the bill as passed by the Senate, but thusfar no such provisions have appeared in the Senate’s version of the bill.
There is still some chance that the bill will be amended in the Senate to include such provisions, and I believe it’s not unheard of for provisions to get tacked on during the reconciliation process even if they weren’t in the versions of the bill that passed in either of the houses.
So we won’t know for sure until the bill hits Biden’s desk.
But I wouldn’t lose sleep.
One of the bill’s provisions would remove the requirement that IRS agents get written approval from their supervisors before assessing penalties against a taxpayer.
My gut feeling is that this isn’t a big deal (contra the Titanic alarm in the linked-to article about it).
It might make it marginally easier for the agency to apply penalties, or somewhat more likely that those penalties will be applied in inconsistent and haphazard ways.
But I suspect it mostly amounts to the trashing of a red-tape, rubber-stamp provision that didn’t have much practical effect.
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.
Privacyadvocates and people & groups with a host of otherconcerns have been urging the IRS to reconsider.
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.
Clarification: the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs in , according to numbers released , but it looks like ’s numbers dropped considerably from there, with the unwillingness of embassies to process renunciations being one reason for the drop. ―♇
At the NWTRCC blog, tax resister William E. Ruhaak shared his experience trying to get the government to acknowledge his carefully-drafted, personal “statement of conscience.”
He fought a determined pro se legal battle to get the U.S. Tax Court to admit his statement of conscience as evidence in his tax appeal.
He believes such a struggle is important in order to defend “The fundamental human right to publicly express an opinion or belief.
And also the right to have a written expression of that belief included in government documentation for future reference.”
The Court eventually gave in and added his statement as a piece of evidence, but seemingly only to humor him.
The ruling in his case reads in part:
We nevertheless admonish petitioner that instituting future proceedings before the Tax Court for the purpose of advancing frivolous arguments relating to his conscientious objection to the payment of Federal taxes is likely to result in the imposition of a significant section 6673 penalty against him.
We recognized four decades ago that “there has been a long and undeviating parade of cases in this and other courts” rejecting the arguments of conscientious objectors who sought to avoid paying “the part of their taxes which they estimated to be attributable to military expenditures and to which they objected because of their religious, moral, and ethical objections to war and because of their claimed ‘rights’ under various constitutional provisions, the Nuremberg Principles, international law, and numerous international agreements and treaties.”
Greenberg v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 806, 810 ().
At this late date, the Court will not condone the continued assertion of similar frivolous positions in meritless litigation that wastes both its own limited resources and those of the IRS.
The War Resisters League has released its annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart fliers, based on the Biden Administration’s proposed budget for .
As Pentagon spending continues to rise, and yet more millions are being spent to arm Ukraine, pie chart aficionados may be surprised to see that the military-spending slice of the pie chart seems to have noticibly shrunk this year.
Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn, who do the research and composition for the pie chart, explain why.
In part, the reason is that they are operating on the proposed budget, not whatever budget (and supplementary appropriations) Congress will eventually, tardily enact.
The Biden Administration’s proposed budget is chockablock with a wish list of non-military spending that Congress will probably not enact.
The absolute amount of military spending has risen substantially, but relatively it looks smaller because of all that extra wish list spending.
The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with a preview of the upcoming tax filing season and other news from the American war tax resistance scene.
The only thing that comes close to the problems we’re seeing now at the Internal Revenue Service was in 1985, when the agency was rolling out some new technology—technology it’s still using today.
Back then, the processing centers got so behind on their work that employees started hiding tax returns in closets and putting them in bags in the trash.
Now it’s way worse, with the IRS, for the second year in a row, entering the filing season with a backlog of millions of not yet processed returns and pieces of correspondence.
The current National Taxpayer Advocate released an amusing blog post about how pathetic and outdated the IRS processes for handling tax returns are. Excerpts:
When I released my annual report in , I said that paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite and the IRS is buried in it.
The reason paper returns are so challenging is that the IRS still has not implemented technology to machine read them, so each digit on every paper return must be manually keystroked into IRS systems by an employee.
The IRS has announced that it plans to hire thousands of new workers to try to deal with its paperwork backlog.
But, in a tight labor market, and unable to offer competitive pay rates to compensate for the soul-crushing tedium ($15.61/hour anyone?), they’re finding it a challenge to turn those plans into personnel.
The Washington Post took a look at a recent job fair the agency held.
IRS employees don’t follow the rules on paid time-off, with a suspicious pattern of sick leave days allowing employees to make their own three-day weekends and extended holidays.
Catalan separatist group / government-in-exile Council for the Republic is promoting a tax redirection campaign in which Catalan citizens withhold the portion of their taxes that would go to the Spanish monarchy or to its repression apparatus, and give that money instead to Front Republicà d’Acció Solidària or some such group working for Catalan independence.
Doomed, quixotic, gonzo tax resister John McAfee is trying to get in the last word by means of a set of interviews he gave when he was on the run from the law.
In them, he explains why he stopped paying. Excerpts:
I’d just had enough.
I’d paid $50 million in income tax over the years.
I thought that was plenty.
I hadn’t paid tax since I went to Belize, but technically, as an American citizen, even if you’re not living in the country, using the services and driving on the roads, you still have to file and pay 30% of your income to the United States.
The only two countries in the world that enforce that rule are the United States and Eritrea!
How [frigging] bizarre is that?
Anyway, I just said, “I’m sorry.
This is insane.
I’m not doing this anymore.”
[I]n America, income tax is in fact unconstitutional anyway.
It was only ever created to fund the war effort in , but that edict, like many others, was never extinguished after the need for it ceased to exist.
I was telling people that I thought taxes were illegal, and if they also felt that they were illegal and/or unjust they should just stop paying, too.
Not just that, I was showing them how to do it without getting caught.
I stumbled somehow on the No Obligation Challenge website.
It looks like a U.K. version of the familiar U.S. tax protester song-and-dance (“Did you know there is no law obligating you to pay council tax?”) but I was impressed by the quality of the graphic design and layout of the website, which is head and shoulders above what I usually see from that segment of the fringe.
The American Prospect published an editorial by Robert Kuttner recommending that Democrats respond with mass tax refusal to the next presidential election if it is won by fraud by the Republican candidate.
Taxpayers owed considerably more money than usual when they filed their income taxes this year — hundreds of billions more.
And this is contributing to a record amount of income tax collection — both in terms of the raw amount, and in terms of the percent of GDP.
This is probably because of a surge in capital gains last year (from which taxes are not withheld over the course of the year) but may be also because much of the recent increases in wealth have gone to people in higher tax brackets.
This increase in the amount owed may cause a little extra “sticker shock” among affected taxpayers.
On the other hand, refunds were also higher than usual this year, so I suppose it could even-out, attitudes-wise.
Spanish war tax resisters have been ramping up their activity as the Ukraine war prompts ever more military spending in Europe.
In the Basque Country, for example, activists have set up offices of war tax resistance in Donostia, Gasteiz, and Bilbao to help people through the process of resistance and redirection.
Ruth Benn of NWTRCC shared her story of trying to access her IRS account on-line.
The IRS is trying to let taxpayers access their information on-line so that the agency can take some pressure off their grievously swamped phone service lines.
They’re also extra-sensitive to security issues, both because taxpayer account information can be private and sensitive, and because international fraudsters use such information to siphon money from the U.S. treasury.
But at the same time, the steps they take to tighten security are frustrating and user-hostile (as Benn found), and raise the hackles of privacy advocates.
This has put them in a tight spot, and the solutions they’ve come up with don’t seem to be solving their problem while at the same time they’re causing frustration for everyone involved.
A campaign urging people to stop paying their energy bills is taking off in the U.K., with promoters comparing it to the Poll Tax rebellion.
The Don’t Pay U.K. website is collecting signers to a pledge to begin refusing to pay on if the pledge gets a million signers.
As of they have collected over 108,000 signers.
The campaigners are reacting to recent increases in home energy bills and are demanding that the government reduce them to more affordable levels.
There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.
This is a special issue focusing on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the organization, and includes some reminiscences from war tax resisters from throughout the history of the group.
The Republican party seems to believe that opposition to the recent IRS funding boost is a winning issue for them, so they are campaigning on pledges to rescind the spending.
I wouldn’t take that too seriously.
I mean, they also promised to rescind Obamacare back in the day, but just kind of flailed around once they had the opportunity.
I’m categorizing this as campaign bluster rather than a serious proposal.
But, in case I’m wrong, The Wall Street Journal breaks down how Republicans might try to claw back this extra funding should they retake Congress.
NWTRCC has a new newsletter out. It includes some news on new U.S. tax policies and official actions and their implications for war tax resisters, and some recaps of the recent 40th anniversary gathering of the organization.
One reason is because my protest was not wrong or a mistake in any sense, whereas paying the fine implies I’m guilty of some sort of offense or misconduct. Further, agreeing to pay has the appearance of an apology or remorse on my part when none is warranted. I believe any nonviolent action against preparations to commit mass destruction with nuclear weapons is in the public interest. Further, my so-called “trespass” was an attempt at crime prevention, or interference with ongoing government criminality, and as such was a civic duty.
When the IRS won a big one-time budget bonus recently, there was some speculation that Congress would claw some of it back by cutting the agency’s annual budget. Sure enough, the recently passed omnibus package cut the IRS allocation by about 2.2%. Expect more of this when the Republicans take over the House of Representatives .
Tax resistance news from hither and yon:
American war tax resisters are fond of pointing out the outrageous sums the U.S. government spends on the military, and the various ways that government tries to hide the price tag by disguising military spending as being something else (for example the recent $53 billion domestic computer chip industry subsidies).
Sometimes the deception is extra-clumsy.
Here’s a great example from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
Notice how all the military budgets are plotted in the same space on the same graph, but the U.S. budget gets its own separate Y-axis?
Here’s how it looks if everything is plotted using the same Y-axis:
Expect this graph to show up in many future “how to lie with statistics” slide decks.
The newly-Republican House Ways and Means Committee hopes to make the IRS squirm.
And so they will have a steady stream of excuses for outrage and maybe some televised hearings, they have created their own on-line IRS Whistleblower Complaint Submission form, meant “[f]or IRS agency personnel interested in providing… information regarding any wrongdoing within the IRS or misuse of taxpayer information.”
Here’s another example of “a suspicious package” containing white powder (which turned out to be harmless sodium carbonate) causing a hazmat evacuation at an IRS building.
If you’re working for a paycheck, the first step in resisting the income tax is to figure out how to stop your employer from withholding it in the first place.
To that end, NWTRCC has just released a flyer on how to control your federal income tax withholding by filing a W-4 form: 
