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.”
- Opposition legislators in the Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly walked out of the assembly to join an anti-tax business strike.
- Businesses in Accra, Ghana’s capital, also launched a brief shutdown to protest oppressive taxes.
- Gold dealers in India have also shuttered their stores and burnt the finance minister in effigy to protest a new excise tax.
- Joshua Browder, a teenaged computer programmer currently attending Stanford University, has developed a free, on-line tool that guides people in the U.K. through the process of fighting their parking tickets. “Since launching in late 2015, it has successfully appealed $3 million worth of tickets.”
- Periodistas por Encargo reviews the arguments for tax resistance and redirection.
- 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.
- Businesses in Huatulco have stopped paying taxes because the government has failed to provide adequate security against violent crime.
- 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.
- Helen Thornley, at Tax Adviser magazine, looks back at the role tax resistance played in the women’s suffrage fight in Britain.
U.S. Tax News
- 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.
- A judge has declared the automated traffic tickets given to motorists in Chicago to be legally unenforceable because the city didn’t follow its own rules in issuing the tickets, what the judge called “a violation of the fundamental principles of justice, equity, and good conscience.”
- 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.
- The identity theft hack of the IRS’s online “Get Transcript” service was much bigger than originally announced.
