Mueller is a tax protester who has done time and racked up tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest in his protest of the refusal of the IRS to acknowledge gay family structures in an equivalent way to straight ones.
In the course of telling Mueller’s story, Infanti allows himself to wander over all sorts of interesting ground regarding tax resistance.
For example, I found out about the curious prohibition on “tax protester” labels at the IRS by reading this article.
Here’s an excerpt about the history of tax protest in the U.S.:
That a stigma is attached to the “tax protester” label may seem odd, given that tax revolts and rebellions have played an important role in the history of the United States.
The Boston Tea Party, Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Fries’ Rebellion were all tax protests.
Indeed, the Boston Tea Party and its protest of “taxation without representation” have become iconic symbols in the United States.
For example, to protest its lack of representation in Congress, the District of Columbia allows its residents to purchase license plates emblazoned with this slogan, and the District’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention this year replicated the original protest by dumping tea into Boston harbor.…
In addition, , woman suffragists refused to pay taxes in order to protest their inability to vote, metaphorically invoking the “no taxation without representation” slogan from the Boston Tea Party.
Today in the U.S., war tax resisters are about the only sizable group of conscientious tax resisters (that is, people who resist in a spirit of conscientious objection to what the tax money is spent on — as opposed to people who resist because they think they have the legal or moral right not to have their money taken from them, and those who resist not because of any ideology but just because they think they can get away with it and the material benefit is worth the risk).
But this may be changing.
This year I’ve been noticing a lot more mention of tax resistance in two other battles: the battle for legal recognition of same-sex marriage and the battle against (government funded) abortion.
In the same-sex marriage case, it’s less a conscientious objection position than one that says the resister won’t pay the “dues of citizenship” for what amounts to second-class citizenship.
But that’s close enough for me.
In the abortion case, the rhetoric is much more similar to that of the war tax resistance movement.
Indeed, a Catholic anti-abortion tax resistance pamphlet I recently discovered on-line has a subtitle — “Are You Praying for Life But Paying for Death?”
— that echoes a motto frequently heard in war tax resistance circles.
The rest of the pamphlet also seems very familiar to me, based on war tax resistance arguments (particularly Christian ones) I’ve read.
There’s the attempt to thread the needle between Romans 13 and Acts 5, a discussion of how taxpaying makes a taxpayer complicit and why this makes conscientious objection a moral duty, and finally some advice on practical steps the reader can take.
Myself, I’m of the “the more, the merrier” school on this.
The more people with diverse ideologies and concerns begin to consider tax resistance as an option, the more the idea can take root that in general it’s inappropriate to force people to pay for other people’s priorities.
Melissa Etheridge’s pledge to stop paying California state taxes in the wake of California voters’ decision to outlaw same-sex marriages like hers struck me as a sort of heat-of-anger decision — not necessarily well thought through as far as its ramifications, but with the sort of appealing righteous logic that makes you think “damn the torpedoes” and just forge ahead.
In that way it reminded me a lot of my own decision to become a tax resister, in which refusing to pay taxes seemed to have become a moral imperative for me well before I’d figured out how I was going to do it.
Now Etheridge is on to stage two: figuring out the messy details.
Etheridge and her wife were on ’s Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about their reaction to the California election results.
I didn’t see the show, but here’s an excerpt from the show’s summary on oprah.com:
In a recent blog posting about the passage of Proposition 8, Melissa vented her frustration by saying she would stop paying taxes.
“I tell people I have until to make true on that blog,” she says.
“That was [me] letting off a lot of steam.
What I wanted to do was show the absurdity of a populace thinking they can take a right away or deny someone a right … and yet feel completely fine taking 100 percent of our taxes.
It doesn’t make sense.”
Meanwhile, same-sex marriage tax resistance pioneer Charles Merrill was on The Ron Reagan Show .
There’s some discussion of the Etheridge tax resistance pledge and general pro-same-sex-marriage talk throughout the show, but the Merrill segment itself starts about 19½ minutes in and lasts about 10 minutes.
Merrill has been resisting , and expects to finally be able to make his case in court .
And it hasn’t escaped my notice that John Bisceglia has refashioned his “Gay Tax Protest” site into one that is promoting a National Equality Tax Prote$t for .
Today, I’m tracking these three tax resisters for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, but it feels like it won’t be long now before I’ll be able to write about the “movement.”
Matthew Bajko at the Bay Area Reporter has done a write-up on the emerging gay rights tax resistance movement.
It covers the folks I’ve been writing about from time-to-time here: Melissa Etheridge, Charles Merrill, and John Bisceglia, but also one I hadn’t heard of before: Emily Drennen, who created a Facebook group for anyone who will be joining her in “refusing to pay CA taxes until I can marry.”
The reporter, in doing his work collecting reaction quotes from politicians and from spokespeople for groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Californians Against Hate, also helped to pollinate the political landscape with the idea of tax resistance as a possible civil disobedience tactic.
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.
A handful of interesting things that stumbled on our internets recently:
An ex-cop is working on a reality TV show designed to catch cops breaking the law.
In the first episode, they catch cops lying to obtain a search warrant and then film them busting into their targeted house — only to find Christmas trees growing where they expected to find a marijuana farm, and surveillance cameras transmitting their surprised expressions back to KopBusters central.
Wendy McElroy has been journaling a year of frugality at her blog — getting the jump on what’s likely to become an increasingly popular genre.
At Tax Update Blog, Joe Kristan reports that the IRS’s “Offers in Compromise” program doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it:
If you watch too much late-night cable television, you probably have seen commercials that make it appear that paying federal taxes is no big deal, because you can always work out a “pennies on the dollar” deal.
Don’t count on it.
One tax attorney writes:
I regularly tell my clients that Offers in Compromise based on doubt as to collectibility are a crap shoot.
You can meet all of the suggested requirements and the IRS can still legally reject your Offer merely because it feels it’s not in its best interests.
Of course, by the time you find out that the Offer is not in the government’s best interest you have voluntarily given it all of the information it needs to seize your assets and have also given them at least an additional year (the filing of an Offer extends the statute of limitations) to collect the tax.
Kristen McKee’s working on some pre-new year’s resolutions.
“One thing I’ve noticed in my deschooling process is my shift from helpless victim, to active participant, in many different areas of my life,” she writes.
One of those areas is taxes: “In the past, I paid my taxes the easiest way I could figure out so I could get the most money back, or the way I knew most others to do it.
This year I am trying to be true to what I really feel is important and learn how to minimize or eliminate the taxes I pay that go to fund a war.”
I wonder, is there a polite way to get all our rights?…
¶ …Personally I think rallies and marches have a purpose because they show our numbers to the media.
But they’re not enough.
And, yes, it’s true, times have changed.
Lying down in the streets and being hauled off in paddy wagons is yesterday.
It’s a new world.
Today it’s all about finances.
I say use what is on everyone’s minds.
Besides, it’s perfect for what is being taken from us.
The battle cry is very old ():
“No taxation without representation.”
It’s also very American.
The phrase was first used to voice the grievances of the British colonies (that would be us).
Just like back then, it means we are not being represented fairly, that we too do not have all the rights other citizens have, so therefore taxing us equally is unconstitutional.
If we don’t have the “right to get married,” or the “the right to be in the military,” or “the right to keep our jobs” or “the right to keep our children,” etc., then we shouldn’t give them all our taxes.
Any questions?
Now when Joan Baez withheld her taxes to protest the Vietnam War in the 60s, she made headlines and she made her point.
But ultimately she had to pay her taxes because she had no legal grounds for withholding the money.
Unlike us, she had all her rights.
She just didn’t like how the government was spending her money: on the war.
Initially, when Prop. 8 passed, Melissa Etheridge announced she would do exactly what I’m proposing.
Then she changed her mind.
It won’t work if only a few people do it.
It should be obvious that the government will just make them pay.
But a huge, well-organized group of people doing it?
That’s different.
That’s a movement saying something loud and clear.
Oh, but one thing: it’s still rude.
And a lot of folks think in light of this wonderful new president, we shouldn’t be rude.
He’s got enough to think about.
I’m not one of them, as you’ve figured out by now.
I think we can do two things at once.
We can support the president and our country.
But we can also support ourselves.
Along with the anti-pork “Tea Parties” and the various war tax resistance actions going on this , this year there is a third set of activists using tax day as their rallying-point.
Equal Taxes, Equal Rights protesters are going to be meeting last-minute filers at post offices around the country to remind people that gays and lesbians are still paying for a first-class ticket but getting second-class citizenship.
David Boaz of Cato @ Liberty calls for a campaign to unite the anti-tax and anti-war movements under a single “Stop the War, Stop the Spending” banner.
Brad Spangler of the Center for a Stateless Society gives the anarchist perspective on Tax Day with his audio op-ed “Taxation is Theft”.
Christopher Beam, Slate’s “Explainer,” explains what happens if you don’t file your taxes:
Probably nothing. If you’re self-employed without any major assets or loans, the odds of getting busted are extremely low. In fact, an estimated 7 million Americans fail to file their taxes every year, and in 2008 the IRS examined only 158,000 such cases. That comes out to a roughly 2 percent chance of getting caught. Even if the IRS does audit you, the agency probably won’t press charges. Instead, they’ll just file a tax return for you and charge you a fee for the trouble.
When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took the reins at the IRS despite having neglected to pay $34,000 in his own taxes, a lot of people were miffed at the hypocrisy.
But none had more cause than IRS employees themselves, who are saddled with strict, zero-tolerance policies against tax evasion that can cost them their jobs.
And:
IRS employees have reported that taxpayers are occasionally citing the Geithner case when they are asked to pay their tax bills. “It’s making the compliance conversation harder,” [Colleen] Kelley [of the National Treasury Employees Union] said.
Conservative columnist Ross Douthat shares his impressions of the Tea Party phenomenon and compares it to the anti-war protests in the Dubya years.
He concludes: “here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on.
So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.”
I posted an update about the ongoing IRS software modernization fiasco.
They seem to have more or less thrown in the towel, after years of missing deadlines and busting budgets and burning through contractors.
The latest news goes into some more detail about how they started playing fast and loose with their budget and their milestones as the project started taking on water faster than they could bail.
Basically, when they would miss a milestone and run out of money, they would steal money budgeted for a future milestone and apply it to the work on the one they’d failed to complete under budget.
Clarence Lee Swartz’s book What is Mutualism? () is now on-line.
It includes a section on “passive resistance,” including tax resistance, from which I take this excerpt:
Many of the less important laws are openly and guilelessly ignored or violated every day, to say nothing of the constant and consistent evasion of taxes by rich and poor, pious and pagan, without the least sense of wrong-doing; but the citation of the foregoing is sufficient to point the way to the ultimate refusal of everyone to support or recognize any authority which denies equality of liberty or which fails to give an equivalent in services for every cent demanded for them.…
Until a majority of the people can be brought to see the need for the legislative repeal of certain laws, passive resistance suggests itself as the best means for securing relief from the oppression of such statutes.
This is a method that seems to occur most readily to the average American, for he is always eager to ignore and evade any law that is not supported by a preponderance of public opinion.
He has no great reverence for law as such, and he is encouraged in that disregard of laws and regulations when he observes the impunity with which they are, in many conspicuous instances, violated and flouted.
He sees, furthermore, that a great deal of sumptuary and otherwise obnoxious legislation receives only hypocritical support from many who were instrumental in securing its enactment, and this decidedly lessens his respect for it.
The way is therefore open for making a law so unpopular that the community will not consent to its enforcement.…
Everyone is familiar with the reluctance with which the average citizen faces the tax collector.
Tax dodging, wherever possible, is practiced by high and low, rich and poor, pious and impious, without distinction, And, in all cases, without the slightest compunction.
Since this habit is indulged in by persons who give no other evidence of dishonesty, it may be believed that the motive is not to shirk a just obligation, but that there is an almost universal feeling that no equivalent ever is received for money thus taken.
This skepticism is due to the common knowledge that the politicians who administer the government are rarely capable business man, are primarily influenced, in the expenditure of the taxpayers’ money, by political considerations or motives of self-aggrandizement, and have every other temptation to become prodigal in dispensing funds the provision of which is not due to their own industry.
Even the most uninformed citizen is aware that all government undertakings are incompetently conducted, that the taxpayers’ money is wasted right and left, that there are hordes of grafters in all such operations, who must be taken care of, and that favoritism, at the expense of efficiency, is everywhere the rule rather than the exception.
On the other hand, all experienced business men know that no private enterprise could ever be successfully conducted by the methods pursued by political management and control, and that, were not the supply of funds for covering government deficits inexhaustible by reason of the power of compulsory taxation, every government project would be bankrupt today.
Small wonder, then, that the harassed and beleaguered taxpayer turns eagerly and naturally to the only mitigation of his distress, which is to evade payment of his taxes wherever possible.
The poll tax, the harshest form of taxation ever conceived, has now been abandoned in many states, for it was discovered that more and more citizens were evading it by the simple expedient of failing to register and vote, since the registration lists were the means relied upon by the assessor for locating the person who had no assessable property.
Expediency, that ever-faithful friend of evolution and progress, has again pointed to a logical and serviceable form of passive resistance.
Therefore, by withdrawing support from the State, where it may be done with impunity, and by ignoring it wherever possible, and where its hand bears most heavily upon the non-invasive citizen, the rigors of governmental interference with individual liberty and with the practice of the principles of Mutualism may be modified by creating a vacuum around the arch aggressor.
all records pertaining to those postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers… the IP address,” et (kitchen sink) cetera.
At Windy City Times, Noel Amberey Ⅱ anticipates a gay tax revolt.
Excerpts:
And why not?
Currently the government is trying to dictate gay personal rights while using our tax dollars, so one good turn deserves another.
A well-orchestrated conscientious objection could effectively cut off all edicts at the pass.
Yes, planning a gay tax revolt instead of your wedding could probably called sedition — not something to take lightly.
In the 1990s I didn’t mind risking arrest for protesting homophobia with ACT UP, Queer Nation and the Pink Panthers, but the threat of tax penalties is enough to give anyone pause.
Nevertheless, in a pink twist on the so-called Porth/Daly tax return [a tax protester strategy of filing a return but leaving most of it blank], if every gay U.S. citizen and their supporters courageously said no to taxation without equal representation, extraordinary changes could occur.
Being levied lately feels like an insult.
Why should we pay salaries of homophobic politicians who begrudge us rights enjoyed by every heterosexual citizen?
Why should queer money fund a military that hypocritically condemns lesbian soldiers?
Gay dollars nourish our country’s kith and kin but by decree we have been left at the altar by our government.
“Tolerance” from conservatives?
Well, how about acceptance?
Call me naïve, but is that too much to ask?
Maybe it is.
Yet recall the violent Stonewall Riots in New York City in , when gays prevailed over police harassment.
Rights are rarely given — they are taken.
Today the enemy sits in Congress.
Instead of blunt force, we need brave souls to say, “I do!” to equal rights and hit Uncle Sam in his wallet.
Abolitionist Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax in in protest of slavery.
Although Thoreau spent only one night in jail, he was eager to serve his cause, and his act of civil disobedience reverberates through history.
Had Thoreau organized a massive poll tax revolt, human bondage in the U.S. may have ended sooner.
Money chants louder than a thousand activists.
Cynical, yes, but the simple truth is most people pay attention when their bottom line is threatened.
Internet technology has the potential to assemble a tax showdown quickly and efficiently.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
You can find minutes and reports from ’s NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland on NWTRCC’s website.
There is typically a statute of limitations for federal tax crimes.
However, during wartime the statute of limitations for crimes “involving fraud or attempted fraud against the United States or any agency thereof in any manner, whether by conspiracy or not” goes into suspended animation “until 5 years after the termination of hostilities as proclaimed by a Presidential proclamation, with notice to Congress, or by a concurrent resolution of Congress” where the definition of “the term ‘war’ includes a specific authorization for the use of the Armed Forces, as described in section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(b)).”
There are some indications that the government is seeking to suspend the statute of limitations for federal tax crimes because of the present state of war.
TaxProf Blog reports: “The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration yesterday reported that 372,000 taxpayers erroneously claimed education tax credits in , totaling $532 million (an average of over $1,400 improper credit per taxpayer).”
Those tax resisters lucky enough to be expecting a large inheritance may take heart from this story of someone who successfully engineered her will so that her heir could donate to charity exactly enough of her estate so that she would owe no estate taxes on the remainder.
Anti-abortion political pressure has led to Congress inserting language in the upcoming health care legislation that would prohibit taxpayer money from going to pay for abortion.
Tom Tomorrow wonders when people opposed to their tax money being spent on war will get that kind of respect:
Another aspect of the upcoming health care legislation is that it includes a big role for the IRS.
This isn’t because the IRS is particularly skilled at administering social welfare programs (indeed fraud is rampant in programs like the earned income tax credit or those education tax credits mentioned earlier in this post), but because legislators have various incentives to hide the spending behind their legislation by not spending outright but only via tax credits and deductions and such.
Since increasing funding for the IRS is not politically popular, this all may have the effect of saddling the agency with more responsibility without giving it sufficient resources.
