How you can resist funding the government → getting under the income tax line → how it’s done → keeping an eye on your budget → consumerism, personal debt

Over at Living on Less they’re discussing the finding that “about half of Americans feel that they do not make enough money to afford the things they need. That includes 39% of people making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.”

These are people making two to four times the median income in the United States — and making enough to put them in the crustiest of the upper crust world-wide. So where does their feeling of being on the edge of financial disaster come from?

Is it just some sort of pathology — like the way anorexics see their protruding hips and ribs as more fatty lumps in need of reduction? Or are the expensive demands of modern life really requiring more money than most people can earn?

One convincing argument blames mass media. Humans are wired, says the argument, to look around themselves for status symbols and compare their own with the social median to see how they’re doing. But today’s humans are comparing themselves not to their peers, but to a combination of their peers and the humans they see on television. People on television are disproportionally wealthy people with lots of leisure time who engage in expensive pastimes. They frequently purchase and own expensive things.

All of the advertisements on television are advertising different things, but it’s also true that most of them are advertising the same thing: that your life will be improved in some way if you buy something. More often than not, this is done by example: a brief vignette is shown, in which a purchased product brightens somebody’s day: The beer drinker gets the girl, the SUV driver smiles at her well-defended passenger child, the former dandruff sufferer fearlessly dons the black turtleneck.

If advertising works on a small scale — to sell a particular product — how must it work on a large scale? There is a shared message of advertisements: Something’s wrong with you, buy something to fix it, you’ll be glad you did. That message is repeated over and over, day in and day out. The products change, the selling stays the same.

So when someone who’s making $75,000 thinks that they’re just getting by, or wonders why the credit card bill never gets paid off, maybe this is why. Nobody can keep pace with the relentless purchasing of the media versions of people we’re using to evaluate our place in the scheme of things.

Another collection of links and such:

• “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees” — “Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” These quotes from a 17 August 2003 memo “sent by the intelligence staff of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, to all concerned military intelligence personnel in Iraq.”
• “A pork-hungry Congress has long been with us, of course, but this year, with our armed forces engaged on two major fronts, Congress has pushed the pork in the defense budget to an all-time high, totaling $8.9 billion.”
• Rusting museum of our attempted suicide survives in the desert — Jon Else revisits the nuclear weapons test site at Frenchman Flat: “An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, Nev. It is ugly and rusting, a big cookie jar from hell — yet it now exists as one of America’s greatest monuments to clear thinking. ¶ That giant safe is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in 1957 (“Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading”). Filled with stocks and bonds, cash and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial instruments could survive nuclear war.… ¶ Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in 1957, only 12 years after the Trinity test — the first nuclear explosion in history took place at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945 — the United States was manufacturing 10 nuclear bombs per day, 3,000 fission and fusion bombs every year. The largest deployable weapon in our ’57 arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujahs or Oaklands) at a pop. ¶ Filling that Mosler vault with stocks and bonds in 1957 now seems a surreal gesture of hope. Imagine the bomb’s survivors — a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) — crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or Grandpa’s gold watch, or their Prudential personal liability policies.”
• Perhaps you’ve heard that some libertarian-minded sorts are hoping to gather the faithful and make their Gulch in New Hampshire. They may be joined by the town of Killington, which wants to secede from their current state and become a little island of New Hampshire deep inside Vermont. What’s triggering the revolt? Taxes, of course.
• The Christian Science Monitor profiles four Americans who dug themselves huge pits with their credit cards and then dug themselves back out. A companion article gives some advice on how to get out of debt. If you need to get out of the red before you can get below the tax line, you might want to give these articles a look.

A San Francisco bay area group calling itself “Compact” has vowed not to buy anything new in 2006 except for food and a few other exceptions.

Compacters can get as much as they want from thrift shops, Craigslist, freecycle.org, eBay and flea markets, as long as the items are secondhand.…

One especially appealing aspect of the Compact is its social component, members say. Fellow Compacters offer advice, moral support, help locating needed items and partners for thrift-store runs.

Some links that have whizzed by my screen in recent days:

War Tax Resisters

• A new edition of The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual, a project of Strike Debt! has a chapter on Tax Debt: The Certainty of Debt and Taxes that was partially inspired by NWTRCC’s material on the subject. (There was some idea-swapping between the Strike Debt crew and war tax resisters at the NWTRCC national gathering in New York last fall.)
• William Ruhaak of has penned a piece on war tax resistance for Pax Christi U.S.A.’s blog. He invites readers who are struggling with their consciences over the issue of paying for war with their taxes to begin by writing and sharing a “statement of conscience.”
• Esther Epp-Tiessen, of Ottawa’s branch of the Mennonite Central Committee, addresses war tax resistance as protest and as conscientious objection:

  Do we use our limited resources of time and money primarily to advance the idea of war tax resistance and a legal peace tax fund for conscientious objectors? Or do we use those resources to speak to the larger policy framework and ethos? To put it crassly, do we advocate for special accommodations for the few? Or do we confront the system that says peace can be built through war and military force?

• Martin Newell has engaged in a variety of anti-war civil disobedience actions, and earlier this month he was sentenced to 28 days in prison for refusing to pay the fines for his previous convictions. He explained:

  Jesus taught us to love not just our neighbours but also our enemies. He showed us by his life and example how to resist evil not with violence but with loving, persistent, firm, active non-violence. It was this revolutionary patience on behalf of the poor and oppressed that, humanly speaking, led to him being arrested, tried, tortured and executed by the powers that be. The acts of witness that resulted in the fines I have refused to pay were a form of conscientious objection. Refusing to pay them is a continuation of that objection. It is a privilege to be able to follow on the path that led Jesus to the way of the cross and resurrection.

Italy

While everyone was busy watching the kerfluffle in Crimea, the people of Venice voted to restore the Venetian Republic and secede from Italy. Italy itself is disregarding the vote and claiming that Venice has no authority to secede. So the movement is moving on to stronger measures. They are taking ideas from other separatist movements: The referendum itself was inspired by a similar effort in Scotland, and they plan now to redirect their federal taxes to the local government, which is a technique they picked up from the Catalan nationalists.

Some are even taking some inspiration from the “Tea Party” apparently. Check out this flashy video:

Netherlands

Christiaan Elderhorst writes about the recent imprisonment of Toine Manders for his work counseling tax avoidance:

Toine Manders works at the Haags Juristen College (Hague Lawyers Board) and specializes in tax avoidance. Manders refers to tax avoidance as a moral duty. Tax revenue is used by the state to pay for war, prisons, the militarization of the police force and the regulatory agencies which constantly privilege big business. This moral duty is connected the Haags Juristen College’s former business practice which was to help individuals avoid the military draft. Avoiding the draft and avoiding taxes are both ways by which personal contribution to state oppression and war is reduced. Calling this a moral duty is not a far-fetched idea.

Austria

Gerhard Höller, a tobacconist from Wagrain, has launched a one-man tax strike.

“Something has to happen at the grassroots, so that those on top notice how much discontent there already is among the population,” says Höller. He was actually a completely apolitical man, he stressed, but the scandals and the squandering of tax money — “from Eurofighters to the Hypo bailout” — had gotten on his last nerve. “Enough is enough.”

When I last visited the site with the article covering Höller’s case, it had a reader poll attached to it that asked people to give their opinion of tax resistance as a protest tactic:

Venezuela

I’m hearing a lot of buzz in the twitterverse about tax resistance as a possible component of the ongoing demonstrations in Venezuela, but I haven’t found much more solid information yet. Here’s an example:

England

Another council tax rebel has been jailed. Ross Longhurst stopped paying his council tax in protest against budget cuts:

“These particularly impact on poor people,” he told the court. “We live in a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”

He claimed there were 20,000 people in Nottingham in council tax arrears.

“I refuse to pay in solidarity with and in support of the victims of austerity measures. I encourage everyone in court, including the magistrates, don’t pay up.”

Magistrates explained to Longhurst, who arrived with a large group of supporters, that he was likely to go to prison if he refused to pay. Justices even urged him to consult with a duty solicitor. But he confidently said he he had spoken with a lawyer and he did not think there was any need for him to see another one.

Another account adds that “[a]s he was led down to the cells by prison guards he was applauded by his supporters and one could be heard shouting: ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful.’ ”

One of his supporters, who did not want to be named, said afterwards: “It is a travesty that he has been jailed. It is disgusting, he is an elderly man who was trying to make a stand, he was trying to make the area a better place and this is why he is now behind bars. He has worked and paid council tax, but as all of us do, he got sick of it, he was braver than everyone because he stood up for what he thought was right.”