Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual war tax resisters →
Mary Loehr
Bobby Smith at Buzzsaw Haircut takes a gander at the Ithica War Tax Resisters and quotes resisters Pete Meyers, Mary Loehr, Laurie Konwinski, Ruth Benn, Peter Goldberger, and Joe Donato.
Excerpts:
Pete Meyers, a member of Ithaca’s War Tax Resistors, said there are many ethical and personally fulfilling benefits to resisting federal war taxes that go beyond the monetary opposition.
“Having done this for eighteen years, it’s not so much whether it’s denying the military money, but what it has done for me.
And it has been profound.”
Meyers, like many war tax resistors, calculates what he owes to the government and funnels the money to philanthropic organizations.
“If I give my money directly to people who need it, I can avoid going through a big government bureaucracy,” he said.
Here’s a piece from the New York Times that mostly concerns the efforts of the promoters of “Peace Tax Fund” legislation in the United States but also touches on American war tax resisters:
War Resisters: ‘We Won’t Go’ to ‘We Won’t Pay’
You could hardly find a more problematic time for pacifists who do not want their taxes spent on the military.
But the recent wave of patriotic fervor has only reinvigorated the efforts of one tiny, determined group.
“On , I was told I should lay low for a while,” said Marian Franz, executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
“Now I have been told this is the time.
As the war grows, so does the antiwar movement.”
For more than three decades, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund has petitioned the federal government for a way to earmark the tax revenues that would go to the military — usually around 50 percent — for nonmilitary purposes, like education or health care.
Like conscientious objectors who in the past were offered an alternative to military service, these resisters say the First Amendment protects their ethical or religious objections to paying for war with their taxes.
Like other groups that have struggled to reconcile the obligations of citizenship with antiwar beliefs, the campaign has had a marked increase in inquiries from the public over the last year.
At the Center on Conscience and War, a Washington-based national nonprofit group that works for the rights of conscientious objectors, phone calls quadrupled right after and are now about 4,000 a month, double the usual number, said J. E. McNeil, the center’s executive director.
Mary Loehr, the coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, an organization based in Ithaca, N.Y., that links 50 groups opposing war or weapons, has also seen a surge in interest.
“Starting , we have had a call a day from people asking for information, and our busy season is usually January through April,” she said.
“I would get 70-year-old women from the Midwest saying: ‘I don’t want to pay for this. Will it hurt my Social Security?’ ”
The debate over whether it is justifiable to withhold tax money from the military was waged on religious, philosophical and legal grounds even before supporters managed to have a bill on the matter introduced in Congress.
Derrick Bell, a visiting professor at the New York University Law School and an expert on constitutional issues, says the law doesn’t allow people to pick and choose where their tax money goes, as if they were at a buffet.
“When particular groups try to exempt themselves from having their tax money support a particular government activity, there is no legal precedent for that,” he said.
Professor Bell said the prevailing standard was that the “free exercise” of religion clause in the First Amendment was violated only if a law was shown to be irrational or unreasonable, or that someone suffered some special harm from it.
He noted, too, that even the right to be a conscientious objector to military service was established by statute and theoretically could be overturned by Congress.
“There is nothing written in stone,” Professor Bell said.
“Even the ‘free exercise’ clause has been variously interpreted.”
Opponents of the tax initiative commonly cite the fear that exempting some taxpayers for their religious beliefs would open a floodgate of claims from others objecting to federal support for everything from the arts to AIDS research.
Last year, for instance, a bill was introduced in the Illinois Legislature that would allow taxpayers who are against the death penalty to have the portion of their taxes that finances executions go to schools.
The bill, which never had any significant support, was killed.
But advocates counter that pacifism, often grounded in religious belief, is in a category by itself.
“Whenever you come up with a new issue, you hear ‘slippery slope,’ ‘Pandora’s box,’ ” said Ms. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and War, who is also a lawyer.
“There is no floodgate.
A minuscule amount of taxpayer money goes to pay for abortion or the death penalty, and other issues are political, not religious.”
In the United States, there has been a long religious and ethical tradition of opposition to war.
During the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes because he opposed slavery and the military.
The Mennonites, the Quakers and the members of the Church of the Brethren, who belong to what are known as historic peace churches because of their pacifist tradition, all refused to take part in the American Revolution.
They laid the foundation for the creation in of the Selective Service Alternative Service Program for conscientious objectors, which started with World War Ⅱ.
Until then, there was no legal recognition for conscientious objection.
During World War Ⅰ, 17 soldiers who were conscientious objectors even received death sentences in a military court, although none were carried out.
In the United States Supreme Court ruled that the criteria for conscientious objection could be broadened to include men who were not members of any religious denomination and in to include those who did not profess belief in a Supreme Being but had ethical or moral convictions against war.
Ms. Loehr, 44, who has been a war tax resister for 22 years, estimates that about 5,000 people around the country currently withhold taxes because of their objections to war and military spending.
Some tax resisters purposely keep their earnings too low to be taxed, she said, while some are self-employed and refuse to pay estimated tax; and some claim an abundance of tax exemptions so their employers cannot take the money from their paychecks.
The Rev. Michael J. Baxter, national secretary for the Catholic Peace Fellowship in South Bend, Ind., and a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, predicts resistance will rise.
“I think as the U.S. gets ready to go to war in Iraq, there will be more tax resisters,” he said.
“Sometimes during war, the place that good Christians belong is in jail.”
His group has already begun advising conscientious objectors in case the draft is revived, he said.
In June, to put a human face on their ideals, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund put together a 15-page booklet featuring the smiling images and often sad tales of tax resisters across the country.
Some of the resisters profiled donate the taxes that they estimate would go to the military to other causes.
Others have been imprisoned or lost their assets because of tax evasion.
They say they have reached their convictions about the immorality of war through their religious beliefs or the influence of thinkers like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As pacifists and pastors in the Church of the Brethren, Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman argue that contributing funds to war is the same as killing.
For 30 years they have given about 60 percent of their taxes to civil rights and peace programs, despite Internal Revenue Service threats of liens against their bank accounts, wage-garnishment letters sent to churches where they worked and government seizure of their family van.
“We will look back on war someday like we did on slavery,” said Mr. Rieman, who lives in Indianapolis.
A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he completed two years of alternative service.
“It feels lonely sometimes, but mostly it feels frustrating,” said Mrs. Rieman, 56, describing the couple’s long odyssey.
“We can’t buy a house, we can’t buy a car.
We don’t enjoy the feeling of religious freedom they say we enjoy in this country.”
Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, said many religious traditions had a history of resistance to laws they considered immoral, those statutes supporting slavery being prime examples.
Even the way that the standards for conscientious objection have changed, from requiring membership in a pacifist church to simply allowing the adherence to certain ethics, shows a government grappling with what constitutes religion, Professor Hauerwas said.
Is it ethics, beliefs, membership?
The Peace Tax Fund bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code, setting up a nonmilitary fund to which pacifists could contribute the tax money that would otherwise go to the military.
Introduced in by Representative Ron Dellums, Democrat of California, it has been reintroduced every year since and had 35 supporters in the House of Representatives during Congress’s last session.
“ changed the equation once again,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York, a two-time co-sponsor of the bill who no longer supports it.
“A case could be made that if every American decided they didn’t like certain policies and decided to withhold taxes, it would be a problem.
It wreaks havoc with government.”
But Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the bill’s current sponsor and a veteran of the civil rights movement, said should not make a difference in supporting the rights of conscientious objectors.
Other groups may have their own objections to the way federal taxes are spent, he said, but his philosophy was “you try to take the ones that have the largest meaning to the largest number of individuals.”
“We will put on a whole new effort when we come back to Congress,” said Mr. Lewis, an ordained Baptist minister.
“Look at the military budget.
We have enough bombs, we have enough missiles, we have enough guns.”
Around the middle of April as the federal income tax filing deadline
approaches, tax resistance articles hit the media frequently. Here are some
examples from past years:
A post-tax-day wrap-up quotes war tax resister Ed Hedemann, and also Jack O’Malley, one of three Catholic priests in Pittsburgh who were refusing to pay war taxes.
A news report on tax day protests includes a mention of “Seven Pittsburgh priests [who] will refuse to pay about a third of their federal income taxes in a protest against the nuclear arms race” and of war tax resister Ralph Dull, who “drove a truck filled with 325 bushels of corn to the IRS office in Dayton” in lieu of cash payment.
Bill Ramsey, Jenny Truax, Rebekah Hassler, Tom & Suzanne Makarewicz, and Mary Loehr mentioned and/or quoted.
If resisters can encourage more people to evade more taxes, even if they do so
for non-idealistic reasons, this both takes resources away from the government
and increases the number of targets the tax enforcers have to pursue, thereby
taking some pressure off of the resisters.
Today I’ll cover how tax resistance movements can contribute to tax evasion
in the culture at large. (At the same time I’ll give a sneak preview of some
of the slides I’m preparing for my upcoming talk in Colombia — beware: I
haven’t asked anyone to proofread my shoddy Spanish translations yet.)
Taxpayer compliance is a challenge for governments to create and maintain,
and they spend a lot of effort trying to understand the mechanics of it and
engage in a lot of propaganda and other forms of manipulation in order to
bring it about.
I’m reminded of the Disney short The Spirit of
which told theatergoers that it
was Taxes that would Defeat the Axis… or the
short film The Tsippori Affair produced by Israel’s
propaganda department (with American help) that showed shocked audiences what
would happen if nobody paid their taxes (for instance, the schools would all
shut down, and school-aged children would lounge about playing cards, drinking
wine, and smoking cigarettes).
I’ve noted before one of the ways the
IRS
supports this pillar. Every year they conduct something they call the
“Taxpayer Attitude Survey” in which they ask a set of questions to 1,000
randomly-phoned American households. The survey contains carefully-loaded
questions like these (emphasis mine):
How much, if any, do you think is an acceptable amount to cheat
on your income taxes?
[Do you agree that] it is every American’s civic duty to pay their
fair share of taxes?
[Do you agree that] everyone who cheats on their taxes should be
held accountable?
Predictably, people overwhelmingly report that cheating is bad and fair shares
are good. The
IRS then
puts out a press release about how Americans overwhelmingly believe everybody
should pay what the government tells them to. Typically the news media go
along with it, composing stories that follow the press release script.
The government is always eager to draw your attention whenever it spends your
money on something nice. There’s hardly a bridge, library, overpass, park,
or other partially-public-funded thing in my town that doesn’t come with a
plaque attached, listing the names of the city councillors and mayor who
signed off on it — though that’s about all they had to do to get such credit.
This is why in the weeks before Tax Day, the
IRS
breathlessly announces indictments against famous people and big-time tax
evaders. Don’t think of stepping out of line, they’re saying, because you’re
sure to get caught. Anecdotes speak stronger than statistics here.
It takes a lot less work for the government to keep taxpayer compliance from
slipping from 90% to 80% than it does for the government to raise
taxpayer compliance from 80% to 90%.
If taxpayer compliance is high, taxpayers will convince themselves
of the attitudes in the pillars. Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like
this? Well, I must have good reasons: it’s because I’m a good citizen, and
I want to contribute to useful things, and besides if I don’t I’ll get caught.
Everybody knows these things.
If taxpayer compliance is low, taxpayers have to be convinced — they
ask instead: Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like
this (when so many other people aren’t)? Am I getting played?
It is easy to point out how many wealthy people and fat corporations get away
with paying little or no taxes. I won’t list examples here as I’m sure you’ve
heard plenty, but here’s one way a group of war tax resisters made this a
little more in-your-face:
At , a merry band of activists from the
local [Bangor, Maine] Peace & Justice Center swapped their cozy jeans
& t-shirts for swanky gowns & tuxedos, hopped in a verrry conspicuous
white stretch-limo, and motored their way to the
P.O./Federal
Bldg., to perform a bit of
satire-filled street theater.
This division of the “Rich People’s Liberation Front” did a skit to expose
the huuuge tax breaks which America’s corporations & our wealthiest
citizens receive; then thanked intrigued passersby with Dum-Dum lollipops.
(“Suckers for the suckers!”)
This is related to what tax geeks call the “salience” of taxation — that is,
how aware you are of the hand that is picking your pocket. If you had to write
a check to Washington every couple of weeks, your income tax would be very
salient. If the money is automatically withheld from your paycheck before you
get your hands on it, it’s less salient. If it’s invisibly included in the
price of the goods you buy, it’s less salient still. Governments are eager to
find ways to tax people in ways that make them less aware that they’re being
taxed, because the less you’re aware of it the less you’ll resist.
There are many other similar examples, both from the war tax resistance
movement and from other movements:
The Tax Foundation raises a ballyhoo every year about what it calls “Tax Freedom Day” — “the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay off its total tax bill for the year” and which lately has been arriving about the same time as federal income tax returns are due, which increases the publicity impact.
The Mennonite Central Committee turned the penny poll idea into an on-line game; another site put together a $3 trillion dollar shopping spree to give people an idea of what kind of cool things they could be investing in if the government weren’t spending all that money on war.
Libertarian Party activists often will hand out fake million dollar bills, each one printed with an estimate of how quickly the government spends that much money.
Another tack is to hand out “Certificates of Debt” that show how much government debt each American taxpayer is on the hook for.
One war tax resistance group held a “Tax Day” protest in which they facetiously labeled the mailboxes down at the post office with the names of military contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton, and Bechtel, to point out where the money was really going to end up.
“April 15th is ‘Support the Pentagon’ Day” read ads in the New York Times .
Under this headline, a cartoon showed a hapless taxpayer with a bit in his mouth, with a load of generals, admirals, and armaments on his back.
On a few occasions, tax resisters have turned themselves in to law
enforcement as a way of showing how little they are afraid of prosecution. For
instance, in Australia’s Northern Territory in
, “the residents drew up a monster petition,
which almost everybody signed, and insisted on the government standing up to
its own laws by taking action against them. They also defied the government to
put them into jail.” And in , three war tax
resisters went to the
IRS
headquarters in Washington to turn themselves in. “If the resisters are not
arrested and prosecuted,” Mary Loehr of NWTRCC
said (and they weren’t, and still haven’t been), “it will expose the myth that
people go to jail for not paying their taxes.”
As professor James C. Scott said of his studies of resistance to
government-mandated tithes in Malaysia, once tax resistance “has become a
customary practice it generates its own expectations about what is permissible
[and] raises the political and administrative costs for any regime that
subsequently decides it will enforce the rules in earnest. For everyday
resisters there is safety in numbers and successful resistance builds its own
momentum.”
The examples I have given here are largely indirect ways of promoting
a cultural atmosphere in which tax evasion seems like more of a good idea. But
there are also more direct ways in which people can assist in the tax evasion
of others. I’ve already mentioned the tactic of
paying in cash so that your
transactions leave less of a paper trail for the government to follow. Here
are a couple of others:
You can spread rumors that a tax has been abolished. This worked with
great success at the time of the French Revolution, when such rumors
became self-fulfilling prophecies. This was also common in Czarist Russia,
when people extrapolated from the propaganda-fuelled image of a benevolent
Czar to conclude that such a Czar must have abolished such awful
taxes. And the present day United States has long had a cottage industry
of people who are convinced (and convincing) that the real United
States Constitution would never permit something as awful as the federal
income tax.
You can manufacture the paraphernalia of tax evasion. For example, in
Mexico City, you can visit a taco stand and walk away not only with lunch,
but — for a small price — with fake receipts from a variety of
restaurants, hotels, and stores, that you can then use to declare business
expenses on your tax returns.
