How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
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workshops and webinars
was my first shot at being a Volunteer Income Tax Assistant.
I worked a 9–2 shift and in that span had a chance to help put together four tax returns.
There was some clunkiness to deal with — one of the two printers failed, and we had no network to transfer files with so we had to shuttle diskettes around.
But we also had fewer clients than had signed up, which I understand is not unexpected this early in the tax season when some people don’t even have all of their W2 forms and such yet.
So we managed to get everybody filed and on their way — and things should go smoother next time now that we know what we’re doing.
The best part of the day for me was seeing the smile on the face of a woman who was getting both the child tax credit and earned income tax credit, which boosted her total refund to something like $4,200.
She was very surprised and very happy — I thought she was going to run over and hug me when I handed over her copies of the forms.
afternoon I was part of a Northern California War Tax Resistance panel conducting an introductory workshop for people interested in war tax resistance.
It is always encouraging to meet people who are determining to take this stand, and it was especially encouraging at this workshop to see people leaving more energetic and enthused and determined than when they arrived.
We’re hoping to do additional outreach in , when a protest march is scheduled to commemorate , and on when a number of groups will join up for a Tax Day protest.
Excuses, excuses: Between working hard at this contract and experiencing a two-day internet outage at home, I haven’t been able to update The Picket Line much lately — which is too bad, because there has been plenty to write about.
As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.”
He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function.
They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”
If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment.
He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.”
He said, “The issue is dying out.
The public has had its referendum.”
And yet there’s activism afoot:
With the sort of astute planning that has made the U.S. peace movement so effective, Northern California War Tax Resistance held a workshop for prospective war tax resisters in the middle of the afternoon on .
Still, the event attracted a dozen people who were determined to start resisting their taxes and were eager to find out how.
The invitation for some of these troops effectively to desert comes from members of the Irish parliament and even a former Irish army commandant, Ed Horgan — who made it clear he wouldn’t make such a suggestion lightly.… ¶ Irish and international law on refugees makes it clear that soldiers are not excluded from making asylum applications, which can be made to any Irish police officer (Garda) or immigration official.
Soldiers who face being forced to obey “unlawful orders” are explicitly mentioned in the refugee statutes.
We assumed that he was planning to write some sort of “look at these scandalous hippies who refuse to support our brave troops” article, but I think, now that I’ve read Li’s article Tax Crazy, which he wrote before attending our meeting, that he was also trying to learn more about tax resistance techniques in the hopes of putting them into service in a conservative tax resistance effort.
Be that as it may, the article Li came up with isn’t much to get excited about.
It starts off with this curious non-sequitir:
For many years, anti-war citizens have been trying to advance their cause without actually doing any work.
War tax resisters are a group of people going back to who feel that they should not pay any or part of their taxes because they feel it would go to a “system that supports the military.”
From there it goes on to chide certain Democrats in Congress for co-sponsoring the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund act on the one hand, and then attacking Bush for failing to adequately supply the troops in Iraq on the other.
In spite of my best efforts (I gave a presentation at the workshop on how to lower your income below the tax line), Li ignored what I had to say on the topic and instead must have lazily referred to the out-of-date NWTRCC literature on the subject, for he writes:
“Some more interesting measures include living below the taxable income level, which is $7,950 if you are filing as a single.”
With the anti-war movement in the doldrums and with many activists staring dumbly into the headlights of the presidential election, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that there’s a lot of fervent interest in war tax resistance.
Indeed, with Code Pink’s “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” campaign and the new “Pledge for Peace” from Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, the war tax resistance movement is playing catch-up.
We’re no longer out in front trying to rally the troops: the troops have run on ahead of us.
Steev Hise was leading a small film crew at the workshop.
He’s working on a war tax resistance documentary (you can see a promotional trailer for the work-in-progress on-line).
Afterwards, his crew came by my place to interview me for the film.
Those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area are invited to come out to either of two free introductory war tax resistance workshops that I’ll be helping to put on with Northern California War Tax Resistance at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in Golden Gate Park.
Take a look at the flyer for details (including directions and public transit options).
When you’re trying to expand the ranks of tax resisters in your campaign, you need good educational tools.
People are often reluctant to resist either because they aren’t sure how to go about it, or because they only have a vague idea of the likely consequences (and so are likely to exaggerate their frightfulness).
When NWTRCC conducted a survey of non-resisting anti-war activists , the most popular answer to the question “Which resources would help you decide to participate [in a tax resistance campaign]?” was: “clear idea of likely consequences” and the two top responses to the question about “the most important reason you have not done war tax resistance” were “fear legal consequences” and “need more information.”
People like to stick with the familiar, and if you ask them to take a jump into the unknown, they will imagine the worst as a way to justify their reticence.
If you can be clear, thorough, and credible in demonstrating how to resist and what the consequences are likely to be, you can eliminate the biggest obstacle to the growth of your campaign.
This is easier said than done, however.
It can be difficult to be clear and thorough if you are going up against a tax agency that is arbitrary or that changes its rules suddenly, and it can take time to establish credibility.
Today I’ll give a few examples of how tax resistance campaigns have dispelled ignorance about tax resistance.
Ethel Ayers Purdie ran what she called the “Women Taxpayer’s Agency” and counseled British women’s suffrage activists both on how to best resist their taxes on no-taxation-without-representation grounds, and on how they could exploit legal quirks to avoid taxes (for instance, archaic laws that made husbands wholly legally liable for their wives’ taxes).
She also published a pamphlet about that particular legal quirk, which concluded:
Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.
Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League regularly gave lectures on their tactic of choice at suffragist meetings, and thereby recruited new resisters.
The American war tax resistance group NWTRCC publishes a number of specialized how-to pamphlets that cover various techniques of tax resistance (such as refusing to file, filing and refusing to pay, living on a non-taxable income) and strategies for coping with possible consequences (such as government collection efforts).
They also have a nationwide network of people who offer one-on-one counseling sessions for potential resisters or for current resisters who are running into snags.
Local groups in the network periodically run workshops at which people can come to learn about the variety of war tax resistance methods and ask questions of people who have experience with them.
The current tax resistance movement in Spain, which has its roots in the war tax resistance movement there but which has expanded to a broader anti-government pro-autonomy critique, recently published half a million copies of a tabloid that included its call to resist alongside some practical instruction on how to go about resisting both the pay-as-you-earn income tax and the value-added tax.
American constitutionalist, “show-me-the-law”-style tax protest often spreads by means of workshops run by self-styled experts who have discovered or invented new (and increasingly baroque) legal arguments that prove that most people are not legally liable to pay the federal income tax.
Although these arguments don’t typically stand up in court, they are sufficiently credible to the lay audience that they can convince many people to begin resisting.
For example, in , an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”
a flier used to educate people about their rights concerning property seizures by bailiffs
Resisters to Thatcher’s Poll Tax gained confidence thanks to the efforts of the Poll Tax Legal Group which, among other things, “produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.”
To combat the threat of property seizure — often the threat itself was enough to intimidate people into stopping their resistance — the movement made efforts to educate the public about the seizure process and about ways to frustrate it:
[T]he first task of Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to inform people about what the bailiffs could and couldn’t do.
In Scotland, people were advised not to tell the sheriffs where they worked, not to tell them which banks they used, and not, under any circumstances, to let them into their houses.
They were also told to inform the local group as soon as the sheriffs threatened anything.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions advised people to move possessions to local friends’ houses before the date of the poinding and offered to help with the moving.
People were told to leave their cars well away from their homes.
They were informed that a wrongful poinding could be appealed against and, in many cases, this was done successfully.
People were also told how to avoid bailiff action by signing away their possessions to people who lived outside of the area or, preferably, to their children.
There are now young children who technically own all of their parents’ possessions.
Some local law centres went onto the offensive against the bailiffs, providing information to the public, which totally undermined their actions.
One morning in , the bailiffs delivered over 4,000 intimidation notices to people throughout Bristol.
By 7:30 a.m. the law centre had heard about this and contacted all local radio stations.
By 8:00 p.m. the news bulletins which went out every fifteen minutes, reported:
Today bailiffs have delivered notices for payment to over 4,000 people in Bristol.
A spokesperson from the law centre said that they were illegal and should be ignored.
So most people ignored them.
The Bardoli satyagraha depended on regular distribution of news bulletins from campaign headquarters to the scattered villages of the province, to make sure everyone was on the same page about strategy, and to counteract government propaganda and rumor.
These also came to be powerful propaganda tools to affect Indian opinion outside of the resisting region:
A campaign like this could not be carried on without a publicity department.
The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign.
A publicity office was therefore opened with Sjt. Jugatram Dave at its head.
With an artist’s pen and with a knowledge of the whole taluka [district] at his fingertips, he took to this work like a duck to water.
The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturists all over the taluka: For four or five days cyclostyled [mimeograph-like] copies were issued, but arrangement was soon made to get them printed daily at Surat, and a start was made with 5,000 copies.
The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity.
All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.
NWTRCC has dug up some interesting bits from their archives, featuring war tax resisters Elizabeth Taylor and Max Sandin, the “From the Poor to the Pentagon” campaign, and a “People’s Tax Reform” campaign in Pittsburgh that asked taxpayers to redirect money from the federal to the local government.
Steve Russell, in the course of some reflections on the recent sagebrush rebellion outbreak in Oregon, shares some war tax resistance memories.
Excerpt:
My wife and I quit paying the war tax, starting a sparring match with the Internal Revenue Service that went on for years.
We got a long respite when the Post Office inadvertently put a document in our mail box meant for the Postal Service for the purpose of locating us and we returned the form to the IRS marked “deceased.”
The next year, after threatening criminal prosecution and being told to go for it, the IRS garnished my wife’s entire paycheck.
I was working only part time at several gigs for which I got a 1099 at the end of the year and there was no withholding, but her pay check was low hanging fruit.
The sum we owed Sam was less than $100, but they took her entire check and would not release it unless we paid.
Having no choice, she went to the bank and got enough pennies to cover the bill, less ten cents.
She went over to the IRS and saw the agent who had been chasing us for a couple of years and put a bag of pennies on his desk.
Scowling, he started counting… and soon announced, “You’re ten cents short.”
At that point, she whipped out a recent cover of a news magazine that was about the My Lai Massacre and featured a headshot of Lt. William Calley, who had been indicted for the murder of Vietnamese civilians.
She had taped a shiny dime over Calley’s hat brass.
Sam spent more money collecting from us than what we paid and we got a great story to tell.
I’m going to be leading a free introductory war tax resistance webinar, organized by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
If you’re curious about what war tax resistance is all about and how people go about it, register here and then tune in at .
, I’ll be conducting a free “Tax Resistance 101” webinar.
I’ve covered the case of anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman a few times before.
He managed to get a hung jury in his previous trial, but then the judge decided he’d prefer a conviction and so refused to allow Bowman to present key parts of his defense during the retrial.
That strikes me as a significant thumb on the scales of justice, but such is how things go in the United States these days.
In any case, at his retrial without benefit of a jury Bowman was convicted and was recently sentenced to probation and $138,026 in restitution.
He says also that the court case has financially ruined him.
He plans to appeal.
War tax resister Alan Barnett has died.
Barnett organized a phone tax resistance group in California during the Vietnam War that included hundreds of resisters.
Spray paint seems to be the tool of choice in the latest human attacks on traffic ticket robots.
People blinded the cameras with paint in the United States, Germany, and France, while other methods were used elsewhere in France.
NWTRCC is kicking off 2021 with a series of on-line events:
NWTRCC coordinator Lincoln Rice is leading a session on war tax resistance at The College of Complexes on . See the NWTRCC website for details.
NWTRCC is holding a 2021 tax season kick-off event “geared toward people that are considering war tax resistance or have recently started war tax resistance” that will be streamed on Facebook on . See the NWTRCC website for details.
There will also be a counselors’ training call on for people who want to keep up-to-date on the latest issues and legal changes in the U.S. so that they can counsel current and potential war tax resisters more effectively.
If you are interested, contact Lincoln Rice at nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org.
Some recent links of note:
NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience.
You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
[S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.
Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters.
That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes.
The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently.
It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction.
For example:
Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent.
People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time.
Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
Hey, what do you know?
Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu.
This strike, which is scheduled to start in , is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.
The latest tax resistance news to hit the web:
Bridget J. Crawford and W. Edward Afield have a forthcoming paper in Tax Law Review in which they analyze the tax resistance of Dorothy Day.
The paper has some good background and overview of her tax resistance and her reasoning behind it, but the authors seem to mostly have the perspective that Day was mistaken and if she only realized what a marvelous social service and wealth-redistribution agency the government is, she would have changed her mind.
The IRS now has its hands on the big budget boost that was recently passed, and one of its first orders of business is to try to boost its depleted and aging workforce.
But that may be easier pledged than done, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The current job market is tight (especially in the finance sector, where the IRS is competing), and agency wages are stagnant against a background of inflation and wage growth in the private-sector.
Expedited hire authority and pay flexibility that were part of early versions of the funding bill were stripped from the final version, so the IRS must plod along as before, though with more budget to work with.
In addition, some of the positions the IRS is hoping to fill are in its hollowed-out human resources department: the same people responsible for recruiting, interviewing, and training new hires.
The founder and former owner of the outdoor recreation gear company Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, has transferred the ownership of the company to a non-profit focused on environmental causes.
If he had sold the company — which is worth something like $3 billion — or if his heirs had inherited it, this would have resulted in a huge tax bill.
But by giving the company entirely to a 501(c)(4) non-profit instead, he avoids those taxes.
So not only was Chouinard generous to environmental causes, he also was able to avoid funding the environmental wrecking ball of the U.S. government.
The U.S. federal government is seeing a surge in tax revenue.
Federal tax collections as a percentage of gross domestic product are higher than they’ve been since World War Ⅱ.
The largest component of this recent increase is from personal income taxes.
In part this is because wages are rising due to inflation and employer competition for labor.
There was an evacuation and large-scale police response at an IRS building in Memphis, Tennessee in response to reports of an “active shooter” in the building.
Those reports were later labeled “misinformation.”
This begins to look like it may have been a case of “swatting” — the use of false, anonymous reports of violent crime in progress to provoke a militarized police response against some target.
I’ve reported on a number of garden-variety bomb threats and “suspicious powder”-style incidents at IRS buildings in the past, but this is the first swatting I’m aware of.
I continue to be impressed at how tax resistance seems to be just part of how politics works in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The latest example comes from a rally by small businesspeople in Butembo, North Kivu who are protesting heavy-handed tax enforcement there.
The latest tax resistance scuttlebutt:
NWTRCC is putting on a free, on-line “War Tax Resistance 101” workshop. Register here.
If you’ve been curious about how to become a war tax resister in the United States, you can learn the basics and get your questions answered by people with extensive knowledge and experience.
Eva Davoine, Sébastien Laffitte, and Wouter Leenders of the University of California at Berkeley conducted a class on “The History of Tax Resistance” last year.
Here’s their syllabus.
It focuses on tax resistance as either rebelliousness or as political “tax revolt”-style resistance, and doesn’t seem to much touch on the conscientious objection variety.
The Republican party, now a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, are leading off by taking some largely-performative jabs at the IRS.
They passed a bill that would rescind the measure passed last year that gives the agency a big boost in funding, but because such a bill would require approval of the Democratic-controlled Senate and of the Democratic president to become law, and as the Republicans in the House made no effort to negotiate a bill that might plausibly get such approval, this was all just for hoots and hollers.
A more interesting (though also, realistically speaking, in the hoots-and-hollers category) jab comes in the form of the “Fair Tax Act” which would replace the bulk of U.S. federal taxes with a nationwide sales tax.
The House plans to bring this up for a vote soon.
This is a proposal that’s been around for a while (for details, see my analysis from ).
It’s not going to happen, but for some reason it’s important for some Republicans that they get to vote on it.
They’re selling it as something that would “abolish the IRS” and so maybe the dreadful details of the proposal matter less than it being just a symbol of the Republicans standing with the taxpayer against the hated tax bureaucracy — something the party seems to have decided on as a winning strategy for appealing to voters.
The real, practical test of the Republicans’ enthusiasm and capabilities for restraining or hobbling the IRS (and of Democrats’ willingness to come to the agency’s defense) will come during the upcoming federal budget deliberations.
Nuclear weapons foe John LaForge (see ♇ ) has surrendered himself for a prison term rather than pay a fine imposed by a German court after he was convicted of trespass during a protest at a German air force base.
The “Don’t Pay UK” campaign now has a German counterpart.
They are trying the threshold gambit: signing up people who are willing to pledge to boycott their utility bills but only when one million people sign on to the pledge.
(Recall that Don’t Pay UK started with a similar threshold scheme, but discarded it when it looked like they would not meet their target number.)
Organizers are upset about the burden of rising electricity prices on poorer households in particular.
