Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Fred Ecks

Fred X wrote to me today:

The impulse for my writing this email is your resistance to supporting the military through income tax. I’m doing the exact same thing. I paid no income tax last year. Legally. And I plan to do the same this year. And probably for some time to come. I too live on a minimal amount of money, avoid paying tax, and have become very dedicated to this concept through recent developments in international relations.

So I wrote back with some questions, starting with: “Did you find lowering your income below the tax threshold was harder or easier than you expected?”

Easier. I didn’t realize just how high that threshold really is, and was pleasantly surprised when I did my taxes for last year and discovered that I was able to pay a total of zero income tax, both fed & state, for the whole year. It wasn’t something I did intentionally at first, but as events unfolded leading to war, it has become a stated goal of mine.

“Did you have to lower your income more or less than you’d anticipated?”

I didn’t have to lower my income. I’ve lived frugally for years, and it wasn’t much of an adjustment to simply stop the paychecks. My expenses haven’t changed much from when I made corporate wages to now. In fact, my monthly budget has remained the same for over 6 years now. Some things increase in price, and others decrease. I’m comfortable.

“Do you think of the decision to do this as more of a personal washing-blood-from-the-hands sort of thing, or more as a protest, or more of a practical strategy to defund the government (or something else entirely)?”

I think of this both as removing myself from any form of responsibility for what the current US administration is doing, as well as a type of protest. I don’t have a practical view of this way of life having any significant effect on the federal government, because the vast majority of Americans will never be steered away from their highly-consumptive lifestyles. But from a personal morality perspective, I gain a sense of “centeredness” in knowing that this is another way in which my lifestyle and my values work together in harmony. There are plenty of ways in which I’m a total hypocrite, but this isn’t one of them.

Fred Ecks has a clue-by-four for those of us who think of personal budgeting like a teenager on a sugar high thinks of algebra homework:

When we go to work, we exchange our life energy for money. Then when we exchange that money for goods & services, we have just expended our stored life energy. If we don’t track how we earn and spend our money, how can we have any idea of whether we’re living in accordance with our values?

Sure, when we break out the cash or checkbook or card at the register, we know that we only have some amount of money available. However, when we tally our expenditures down to the penny at the end of each month, only then do we see clearly that we spent X on groceries, Y on housing, Z on transportation, etc. Without reviewing our actions, how do we know how we’ve been living?…

This is about spending in alignment with our values. For me, this means that I’ll choose junker furniture, but have of the best running shoes money can buy. It’s about making clear, conscious choices.

How many hours of your life did you spend on food last month? Do you wish you had spent more of your life on this, or less? How about transportation to visit with friends?

If we can’t answer simple questions such as these, we’re living in the dark.…

Can you imagine a business which doesn’t do detailed accounting? Why would we live more consciously as businesses than as individual humans?

Fred Ecks reports: “I filed my taxes yesterday. Total federal income tax: $0.00. Total state income tax: $0.00. This makes four years in a row without paying a dime in income tax. Ever since the ‘retirement savings contribution credit’ went into effect as a bone thrown to the poor as part of the tax cut for the rich in 2001, I’ve lived below taxable levels. I strive to maintain this as a form of protest against the actions of the federal government in recent years.”

Fred Ecks dropped me a link and a complement in a post of his about socially responsible investing that asks some questions I’ve wrestled with as well. How does socially responsible stock picking work? In what way do you support the actions of a company by buying that company’s stock on the market, and in what way do you discourage their actions by buying another stock instead? One commenter suggests leaving the stock market behind entirely and investing directly in “a socially responsible business, founding a co-op or franchise that does socially responsible business.”

Dreading tax season? Fred Ecks is looking forward to it! Resisting taxes by getting below the tax line makes April 15^th seem almost like a holiday.