How you can resist funding the government → a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns → reach out to potential resisters at the time and place of payment → Tax Day actions → 2021

Some recent links of interest:

• War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:

  Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death. But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.

• The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity. This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich. And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
• The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government. In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign. Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign. But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
• War tax resistance also continues in Spain, with offices of tax resistance opening in various cities to counsel potential resisters this tax season.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robot cameras blinded with spray paint in France and Germany, pilfered in South Africa, stickers and graffiti reading “non-essential” blinding the cameras in France, along with other spray paint and fire attacks, and more camera destruction in Italy and England.
• In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
• NWTRCC is collecting 2021 “Tax Day” protest and outreach actions around the United States.
• Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.

Recent links of note:

• Some more details have emerged about the Biden administration plan to beef up the IRS enforcement budget. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the administration is seeking a $1.2 billion / 10.4% total increase in the agency budget, most of which would go to tax enforcement.
• Every once in a while, the IRS crunches the numbers and tries to figure out the size of the “tax gap” — the difference between what Americans owe and what they actually cough up. The problem is that there are a lot of unknowns — unpaid taxes that the government currently has no way of knowing that it is owed. So it has to make guesses and extrapolations. Now, in testimony to a Congressional committee, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has admitted what I’ve long suspected: the agency’s estimates of the “tax gap” have been far too low and the real number is more than double what has been reported.
• Meanwhile, the IRS is still struggling to get through its backlog of tax year 2019 income tax return filings as this year’s tax filing season hits its peak. This is further complicated this year by the agency’s role in administering a new stimulus check dispersal, and last-minute retroactive changes to the tax laws that made some already-filed returns incorrect and that gave the agency responsibility for rolling out a new tax credit.
• United for Peace & Justice highlights how war tax resisters are organizing for this year’s tax season.
• Sojourners highlights Christian war tax resisters.
• Cartoonist Peter Bagge examines the life of Henry David Thoreau at Reason.
• The war tax resistance season has also begun in Spain.
• More traffic ticket robots are disabled by rebels in France, Italy, and Germany.

The latest news on the tax resistance front:

• The latest tax strike in South Kivu has come to a negotiated end after four days of talks, with the local government agreeing to the strikers’ demands to rehabilitate transportation infrastructure.
• The annual Global Days of Action on Military Spending included some war tax resistance events, particularly in the United States and in Spain — two places where war tax resistance is better-established as a vital part of antimilitarist action.
  • In Biscay, resisters held another food-themed protest at a Treasury building, featuring a cake decorated as Picasso’s Guernica: “No weapons, no bombs, better chocolates, no war!”
  • In the United States, that campaign culminated on Tax Day this year. War tax resisters took action from coast to coast.
  • Ruth Benn reflected on tax resistance during the recent Gaza attacks.
  • And war tax resister Lindsey Britt spoke up in the Brattleboro Reformer.
• Restaurants in Rosario, Argentina have gone on a tax strike, and were soon joined by gymnasiums. The businesses say they cannot afford taxes while they are under Covid-related restrictions that prevent them from operating at capacity.
• The Philadelphia Tribune reminded readers about war tax refuser Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson.
• There’s a roadblock to the Democrats’ plans to use increased IRS enforcement to bring in more money to pay for their ambitious federal budget: The fact that under Congressional budgeting rules, increasing the IRS budget counts as an expense, but increases in tax revenue that might be expected as a result don’t offset that expense. Which means Congress has to jump through extra hoops to justify that extra spending.
  • As part of the proposals, the Biden administration hopes to force banks to report on how much goes into and comes out of their customers’ bank accounts.
  • Republicans smell blood in the water, and suspect that beefing up such IRS tax enforcement might not be politically popular. They hope they can exploit anti-tax-snoop sentiment to stymie Democratic spending priorities.
• The IRS expects to lose 52,000 of its 83,000 employees to retirement over the next six years. Hiring freezes and budget cuts have aged its workforce. But now they’re going on a hiring spree to try to make up for it.
• NWTRCC held another national (on-line) gathering.
• Human attacks on traffic ticket robots took casualties in Réunion, France, and Germany and in France, the U.K., and Spain in recent weeks.
• Tax resistance is on the agenda in South Africa as taxpayers there are increasingly fed up with government corruption.

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.