Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Argentina → opposition to paying for abortions, 2021

Some recent tax resistance links of interest:

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Content includes:
  • IRS Circumvents “Statute of Limitations” by Ruth Benn. Normally, the IRS has ten years to collect unpaid taxes from you before they have to give up. Also, normally, if you decide to voluntarily pay your taxes, you can also decide for which tax year you are paying them, and by IRS policy, they’ll respect that. Ruth Benn’s tax resistance takes the form of refusing to pay her income tax, but voluntarily paying her self-employment tax. As the ten year statute of limitations approached on one of her unpaid years of income tax, the IRS tried to pull a fast one and used some sleight-of-hand to apply the money Benn was paying for the current year’s self-employment tax to the expiring year’s income tax amount. She is hoping to get the agency to change its mind and to respect its own policy, and promises to keep us up to date on how the red tape tangles.
  • Counseling Notes. Including a reminder that Social Security levies can continue past the ten-year statute of limitations date because the levy is considered “continuous” when it is first applied (not reapplied with each new Social Security check).
  • An announcement of the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering, which will have an international focus, featuring speakers from Money Rebellion (U.K.) and Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga (Spain).
  • News of a new regional war tax resistance group starting in western Massachusetts called Taxes for Peace New England.
• Democrats are keen to force banks to report how much their customers have put into and taken out of their accounts each year. They hope this will bring to the surface some of the money in the underground economy that the government has been frustrated when trying to tax. This proposal has gotten a lot of pushback, and has been an on-again / off-again part of the budget package currently oozing through Congress. The latest guesswork suggests that the Democrats may reactivate the proposal but restrict it to accounts with $10,000 or more in them.
• There’s a nice website that’s been established by the caretakers of The Nelson Homestead — the modest home of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It has good recaps of the lives and activism of the Nelsons, including photos.
• Helen Thornley’s “No Vote, No Tax! The Women’s Tax Resistance League from 1909 to 1918” is featured in volume 4 of Contemporary Issues in Tax Research.
• Environmental activists hoping to stop a new incinerator in Edmonton, north London, are refusing to pay their council tax.
• The Biafra Nations League, which is trying to establish a break-away nation more representative of the Igbo people, has issued an ultimatum to oil firms in the area, ordering them to stop paying taxes to Cameroon and Nigeria, which currently claim sovereignty over the region.
• Argentina legalized abortion earlier this year. Now a group of Argentine legislators have proposed a law that would permit a sort of conscientious objection to taxpayer-involvement in abortion, of a similar sort to what is proposed in the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act” in the U.S.

  …a bill which, if approved, would allow conscientious tax objection to those who are against abortion for moral, ethical, religious, or scientific reasons. In essence, the practice of abortion would draw the necessary resources from a special fund, without using budget items or subsidies from the national treasury. The taxpayer could at this point expressly ask that the money paid in taxes not go to feed this fund, avoiding participating with their own money in the killing of children in the womb.

• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taken out of service by human rebels in the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany & France in recent weeks.