The right-wing of the domestic internet has lately been outraged about Planned Parenthood, over the issue of abortion in particular.
I’ve lost track of how many tweets I’ve seen that are variations on “I’m going to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t stop funding Planned Parenthood!”
Easier tweeted than done, of course, and today’s American right-wingers have a pretty poor record of follow-through on threats like these.
But then there’s Ann Barnhardt.
She’s a Catholic counter-reformist who burned a Koran on camera (“bookmarked with raw bacon”) and who shut down her financial services business in to “Go Galt” and stop paying taxes.
In a post on her blog, Barnhardt explains why the Bible’s “Render Unto Caesar…” verse doesn’t discourage her from refusing to pay federal taxes.
Her conclusion:
Enough is enough. You cannot subsidize this government and still claim that God is “first” in your life.
It is mathematically, metaphysically and morally impossible.
You must choose your allegiances now.
You must now choose who or what it is that you truly worship.
Do you worship God or do you worship your wealth?
Here’s a simple litmus test for you: are you or are you not willing to give up all of your wealth in bearing witness to God in His Truth?
If the answer is no, then stop calling yourself a Christian, because you very simply are not.
The IRS hung up on 8.8 million callers who tried to contact the agency during this year’s tax filing season.
Only 37% of those who called actually managed to hear a non-recorded voice.
The IRS calls these hang-ups “courtesy disconnects.”
The Pope came to visit, and gave a shout-out to Catholic Worker activist and war tax resister Dorothy Day in his address to Congress.
It’s been amusing watching politicians and activists from just about every ideological niche try to claim the Pope as one of their own… it reminds me of the old saw about the blind men and the elephant.
Or maybe it’s similar to how so many different ideologies, practices, and beliefs all claim to be interpretations of the real teachings of Jesus — nowadays we all get to interpret the Pope in our own way too…
Is the Pope Catholic? Perhaps with a lower-case “c”.
A coalition of nationalist parties won the recent Catalan election, which
they were billing as a referendum on independence. They have vowed to begin
to separate from Spain within the next couple of years. Part of this
independence campaign has already begun, with a number of municipalities,
businesses, and individuals paying their federal taxes to the state
government of Catalonia. “The key element that will permit us to exercise and maintain our independence will be the collection of all of the taxes by the government of Catalonia,”
according to planning documents of the coalition. The state currently
forwards those taxes on to the central government, so this form of tax
resistance is largely a symbolic gesture. But the new government hopes to
make this currently somewhat-illicit process official and then, eventually,
to cut off the central government. In case of conflict with the central
government over how taxes are to be paid, they may launch a blockade of the
federal tax offices so as to encourage people to file with the Catalan tax
authorities instead.
Merchants across Pakistan have been conducting strikes to protest a new withholding tax on bank transactions.
“If the government does not accept our demands,” said Naeem Mir, one of the strike leaders, “we will
observe a series of shutter-down strikes… in the four provinces and in each
and every small and big city in protest against the cruel taxation measures
of the so-called business-friendly government.” The new taxes are being
blamed on IMF-required
austerity and on the expenses of Pakistan’s version of the “war on
terror.”
Greece
The economic crisis in Greece has crushed what was already a pretty weak
state of “taxpayer morale” — the “won’t pay” movement that practiced
noncompliance with taxes and road tolls helped bring down the government
and sweep a left-wing coalition into power. One of this new government’s
officials, deputy finance minister Alexis Haritsis, was a “won’t pay” activist.
Greeks are turning away in disgust from the official economy in general, increasingly turning to barter to get their needs met.
Italy
Fifty condominium owners in Prino, Italy, have organized to stop paying
the “IMU”
municipal property tax in response to the city’s neglect of public spaces,
including a filthy public square with a broken fountain that’s become a
rubbish heap, poor upkeep of drainage that leads to flooding, and bad
traffic management. A letter announcing the strike, signed by all fifty,
was sent to the mayor and other city officials.
Some recent links from here and there related to tax resistance:
International
Here’s an interview with Tommaso Cerno, who has recently launched a tax strike for gay rights in Italy.
“Only one weapon of resistance remains to us: to evade the state that does not recognize our rights at the only place where it does consider us equal: when we pay taxes.”
Tax resistance plays a role in the anti-bullfighting movement in Galicia, to pressure the government not to allocate public funds to events that feature bullfighting.
The Suepples public employees union in Venezuela, saying that employee salaries have not kept up with tax hikes, made a declaration of tax resistance.
“We aren’t just refusing for the fun of it, we refuse because we’re broke,” said finance secretary Adela Otaiza.
The government is using astronomical inflation to ratchet up taxes and ratchet down public employee wages to make up for drops in oil revenues and a poorly overmanaged socialist economy.
Procedurally Taxing takes a closer look at the new law that allows the government to deny or rescind passports of people with large tax debts.
(My own debt is getting large enough that it may trigger this within a couple of years, so I’m paying close attention.)
This article asks if a bankruptcy that removes or reduces your tax debt is sufficient to also remove the passport restrictions.
Read the comments, too.
The Institute for Justice has scored another victory against IRS civil forfeiture, successfully winning back Ken Quran’s life savings that the agency tried to steal from him.
Cash transactions are harder to tax (or to ban) because they don’t leave as much of a trace.
So governments have begun floating ideas to discourage or eliminate cash.
The latest salvo was a New York Times editorial encouraging the government to eliminate the $100 bill.
