How you can resist funding the government →
other ways the government is funded →
duties & tariffs
One variety of tax that I don’t spend much time on here at The Picket Line is tariffs — taxes on certain imported goods.
There are plenty of reasons to hate tariffs, but the Washington Post uncovered another:
Although the average tariff on non-agricultural goods imported into the United States is less than 3 percent, tariffs on a number of everyday consumer products — including clothing, luggage, dinnerware and handbags — range well into double digits.
The same goes for some food, such as butter and cheese.
(These tariffs are separate from special duties imposed on certain foreign products that the government has found to be “dumped,” or sold at unfairly low prices.)
…the system has evolved in a way that produces a bizarre result: Some of the stiffest tariffs apply to the types of goods that people of modest means tend to buy, and lower duties are imposed on similar products that are more often purchased by upper-income individuals.
Sweaters offer a vivid example: If they’re acrylic, the tariff is 32 percent.
But if they’re wool, the tariff is 17 percent.
On cashmere sweaters, the tariff is lower still — 4 percent — and on silk ones, 0.9 percent.…
In the case of low-end sneakers, tariffs range between 48 and 67 percent, but tariffs on higher-end sneakers are only 20 percent, and for leather dress shoes, the tariff is 8.5 percent.
Plastic handbags are hit with 16 percent tariffs but reptile-skin ones with only 5.3 percent tariffs.
For drinking glasses, the tariff is 28.5 percent if the value at the border is 30 cents or less, but 5 percent if the value is $5 or more.
“Over the past 40 years, we’ve created a very skewed system, where many of the things that poor families buy are very heavily taxed, and things that only rich families buy are not,” said Edward Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
“Of the five different kinds of taxes that the federal government imposes, tariffs are the smallest — but they’re by far the most regressive.”
Barbara Andrews’s Tax Resistance in American History has helped me track down some more evidence of Quaker tax resistance around the time of the American Revolution.
This comes from the journals of Quaker Warner Mifflin:
The American Revolution now began to make its appearance; and as I was religiously restrained from taking any part therein, the epithet of toryism was placed on me, by interested holders of slaves.
Insinuations were also thrown out, that my labour for the freedom of the blacks was in order to attach them to the British interest; notwithstanding I had liberated mine, on the ground of religious conviction, before this revolutionary period arrived.
Added to this, on the issuing of the bills of credit, by Congress, I felt restricted from receiving them, lest I might thereby, in some sort, defile my hands with one of the engines of war.
From this circumstance, I was further dipped into sympathy with the condition of the blacks; for, by declining to use the paper money, I was in danger of being declared an enemy to my country, and like them, to be thrown out from the benefit of its laws: and this for no other crime, but yielding to the impulses of Divine grace, or obedience to the law of God, written in my heart; which I ever found the safest ground to move upon.
Abundant threats were poured out, that my house should be pulled down over my head; — that I should be shot, carted, &c. This proved a fiery trial, and my mind was almost overwhelmed, lest I should bring my family to want, and for fear that it might be through a deception.
In the bitterness of my soul, I left my house in the night-season, and walked into a field; but without any sensible relief, returned again to the house.
On stepping in at the door, I saw a Testament, and opening it at the 13th chapter of Revelations, found mention there made of a time when none should buy or sell, but those who received the mark of the beast, in the right hand, or forehead.
Now, it fixed in my mind, that if I took that money, after receiving those impressions, I should receive a mark of the bestial spirit of war, in my right hand, and then, the penalty which is annexed, and described in the ensuing chapter, must follow.
I then resolved, through the Lord’s assistance, (which I craved might be afforded,) let what would follow, never to deal in any of it.
This afforded me some relief; and, finding my wife so far united with me, as to refuse it likewise, she saying, though she did not feel the matter as I did, yet, for fear of weakening my hands, she was most easy not to touch it, — I became much strengthened, and resigned to suffer what might be permitted; feeling, at times, the prevalence of that Power, which delivers from all fear of the malice of men, or infernal spirits, and which reduces the soul into perfect subjection to the holy will, and ordering of the Divine Providence.
Light seems to be increasingly spreading, on this subject; or, at least, more are disposed to yield to its emanations, than heretofore.
An instance of this appears in a pamphlet, written by a clergyman, in England, and lately reprinted in Philadelphia, which I would recommend to the perusal of my readers.
In it are these remarks:
Such is the dread of singularity, in dissenting from opinions, sanctioned by public approbation and applause, that but few have courage to forsake the beaten track, and think for themselves, in matters confessedly of the highest importance.
And thus, the specious reasonings and conclusions of men, who have no better claim to infallibility than ourselves, — are suffered to divert us from a simple attention to the example, and un-ambiguous precepts of him, who has presented to us, in his own sacred person, celestial excellence, and the most complete pattern of all moral virtue.
On subjects, which do not relate to the great truths of religion, we may be indifferent; and it is, doubtless, best not to be earnest and tenacious for either side of the question: but, in relation to doctrines, upon the establishment and promulgation of which, the temporal, and perhaps the eternal welfare of millions, to some measure, depends, — it is the duty of interest of every one to search for truth, as for hid treasure; — to be fully persuaded in his own mind, that his principles are founded in immutable Truth, and unerring rectitude.
Let such then unfold the sacred volume, and say in what part of it they can find any passage, that will, either directly or indirectly, prove war to be justifiable, on Christian principles; — that will furnish one argument in favour of a Christian’s endeavouring to injure his fellow-creature, even his most bitter and inveterate enemy, so much as in thought; — or, what is more, that can justify him in dislodging a human soul from its appointed tabernacle, by destroying that life, which he neither gave, nor can restore.
Do not the doctrines of the New Testament uniformly declare against it; and most expressly and unequivocally prove, that war is directly opposed to the very aim and end of Christianity; which offers reconciliation to the greatest offenders, and makes our acceptance with God, absolutely to depend on our forgiveness of those, by whom we, ourselves, have been injured.
What can be said in extenuation of the guilt of those who set others on to war, who never saw each other’s faces, nor even had any possible occasion for hatred or animosity?
Who can say that such are more innocent, than the duelist and suicide, or less deserving the punishment due to such heinous offences against the Divine law?
An occurrence took place, which produced renewed exercise of mind, and, in the hour of affliction, sealed further instruction on this subject.
I received a severe hurt on my leg; and while under extreme anguish in dressing it, was brought into sympathy with a poor soldier, whose leg being fractured, he was left without help, in the field of battle.
Even since arriving to years, capable of judging, I have had a testimony against war; but never so powerfully impressive, as at that time.
So that I told my wife, if every farthing we possessed was seized for the purpose of supporting war, and I was informed that it should all go, unless I voluntarily gave a shilling, I was satisfied I should not so redeem it.
Shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles.
For I had kept an apothecary shop; which business suited my inclination and capacity; being from my youth circumscribed, both in shop-keeping and my trade of a hatter, on account of the prevailing fashions.
After much seeking to the Lord for counsel and direction, I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
But I am well satisfied, feeling the testimony against war to be very precious, and worth suffering for, if thereby the peaceable government of the Messiah may be promoted.
After the Revolution, the concern about war taxes did not go away, and Quakers continued to hold “scruples” about contributing to military defense and repaying Congress’s war debts.
Rufus Hall reported:
, was our preparative meeting, in which life arose and light shone triumphant over all, to the encouraging of some of our minds.
It being the time of answering the Queries, some things were closely searched into; particularly that of paying a tax, which many Friends thought was principally for the support of warlike purposes; such as building fortifications, ships of war, &c. But this tax being so blended with other taxes and duties, made it difficult: some Friends not being free to pay it, as believing it inconsistent with their religious principles and testimony against war; while others had paid it.
A concern was felt that Friends might be preserved, so as to act with consistency therein.
It was understood by some that Friends in New York generally paid it; and it was alleged that formerly while we were under the king of England, we had to answer a query in relation to not defrauding the king of his dues; and they could see no difference in this respect between king and congress; and that therefore we might pay those taxes now as well as formerly.
On the other hand, it was stated that the ground on which we were raised to be a separate people or society, was that of tender scruples of conscience; and it was on this ground, or principle of Divine light, that the reformation had always stood, and must still stand, if it is carried on; and therefore that Friends would not do well to look to New York or London, nor even to former customs, for direction; seeing we had to go forward and not backward, nor yet to stand still with the work of reformation.
As to defrauding any of their dues, there was no such thing in the case; for to defraud was willfully, obstinately, or craftily to detain a thing from the right owner.
But in this case there was neither will, obstinacy, nor craft; but purely a tender scruple of mind or conscience; and therefore it ought to be attended to, and Friends should not desert the ground (now in a day of ease) on which their predecessors stood, and nobly maintained it in the times of hot persecution.
On the whole, it appeared to me that the weighty concern of the meeting was against paying the tax; but as the subject was new to some, and others were not altogether clear, by reason of long custom, so as to see the inconsistency of paying it, — it was thought best to let every Friend act according to their freedom therein.
I was truly thankful that Friends were preserved in such unity and harmony, that I did not discover any hardness towards one another; but all spoke with coolness of mind, and none showed any symptoms of heated zeal; which is too often the case in such matters.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been keeping a fraction of an eye on the U.S. Treasury Department’s megalomaniacal thrashings about of late.
The more I learn about it the more bafflingly absurd it seems, but I also realize I’m in way over my head and don’t really have any expertise to draw on in interpreting what I learn.
On the other hand, those who do have the requisite expertise don’t seem to have the humility to understand that even so, they don’t really understand what they’re doing and have so far led things to ruin — they’re just certain that with a tighter grip on the wheel and a whole lot more money (why don’t we ask the taxpayers for a big loan — they’ve never said no before!) the cards are bound to come up better sooner or later and then this will all be like a bad dream.
The U.S. Treasury is seeking (or has just assumed) the “authority to issue up to $700 billion of Treasury securities to finance the purchase of troubled assets.
The purchases are intended to be residential and commercial mortgage-related assets, which may include mortgage-backed securities and whole loans” (I’m quoting from the Treasury Department’s press release).
If the U.S. Treasury just seized/purchased your mortgage… now there’s a dilemma!
What’s a tax resister to do?
When FDIC head Shelia Bair says her agency might have to bolster the FDIC’s insurance fund with Treasury borrowings to pay for the new spate of bank failures, a lot of us, this 40-year banking veteran included, assumed there’s an actual FDIC fund in need of bolstering.
We were wrong. As a former FDIC chairman, Bill Isaac,
points out here, the FDIC Insurance Fund is an accounting fiction. It
takes in premiums from banks, then turns those premiums over to the Treasury,
which adds the money to the government’s general coffers for “spending… on
missiles, school lunches, water projects, and the like.”
The insurance premiums aren’t really premiums at all, therefore.
They’re a tax by another name.
You’ll recognize this as similar to the trick the government plays with the quasi-insurance trust funds for social security and medicare — the government goes out and spends the money, replacing it with IOUs which it has no plans to honor.
And so I got to thinking about how many other ways the government reaches into our pockets, and to what extent we can resist these.
As I noted , a large and growing percentage of Americans do not pay
any federal income tax. This poses a bit of a challenge to the American war
tax resistance movement, since most of their literature involves resisting
that tax. (And the rest mostly concerns the excise tax on local telephone
service — which is also becoming less relevant as more people are switching to
cell phones and internet telephony.)
…we need to have something to say when we encounter an activist in the non-income-tax-paying 40%.
It may be difficult to recruit someone into war tax resistance when most of our literature concerns a tax that a lot of folks aren’t paying anymore…
…[It] might be a good idea for war tax resisters to consider ways of refining their messages so as to take some of the emphasis off of the federal income tax and instead cover the whole spectrum of ways people fund the government and its policies.
Which is a good question, and one I don’t know the answer to (or if there’s an answer, especially with things changing so rapidly lately).
I took a look at the federal budget to see what kind of numbers they use.
I’m sure that it’s misleading, but it does itemize many of the ways money we earn becomes money they spend.
According to the budget for , the government brought in $2,567,672,504,536 in “budget receipts” — mostly what we typically think of as taxes.
These can be broken down as follows:
45%
individual income tax
34%
social insurance / retirement
14%
corporate income tax
3%
excise taxes
1%
estate & gift taxes
1%
customs duties
2%
miscellaneous
Confusingly, one section of the report threw the FICA acronym in with the “individual income taxes” section instead of the “social insurance and retirement” section where I would have expected to find it.
So even at this level of granularity, I’m a little confused as to what the numbers mean.
Each of these categories is further subdivided. Under the individual income taxes section, for instance, you can learn that $49,779,182 was donated by the foolish and insane to the presidential campaign fund to help pay for those marvelous political conventions and advertisements we’ve
been seeing lately.
The “excise taxes” category is subdivided to show the various taxes and trust funds involved — though there are negative numbers in the column as well, and I’m not sure why — do some of the trust funds give out refunds? do some relinquish their money into the general fund somewhere else? do some involve so much overhead that they don’t end up in the black?
In any case, the biggest item here is deposits into the highway trust fund / leaking underground storage tank trust fund — totaling about $40½ billion of the $65 billion in the “excise taxes” category (if I’m reading the numbers right) and coming from the gas tax.
There’s a catch-all subcategory also called “excise taxes” that runs another $15 billion, and then another $11½ billion coming from the airport & airway trust fund — money that eventually comes from inflated airline ticket prices I’d imagine.
And there are many also-rans: vaccine injury compensation fund, black lung disability trust fund, tobacco excise tax, etc. Because there’s an obscurely-labeled negative $7½ billion or so in the mix, the numbers I’ve given here don’t add up like they ought.
The customs duties aren’t subdivided according to what the duties applied to — except for arms and ammunition — so that’s less helpful. The estate/gift tax
is an unsubdivided line-item.
The miscellaneous section has some interesting bits in it.
Most of it comes from federal reserve deposits and doesn’t much concern us.
Another $10 billion comes from user fees, licenses, filing fees and the like, including that “universal service fund” fee you see on your phone bill (that’s $7½ billion of the ten) and immigration, passport, and consular fees (another billion).
The government hauls in $4½ billion from assessing fines, penalties, and from seizing stuff and selling it at auction.
It brings in $241 million from “gifts & contributions” — you heard that right — including (get this) $3,594,405 from something called the “Conscience Fund”:
Money voluntarily paid to restore amounts which the donor considers to have been wrongfully acquired or withheld from the Government.
Also includes moneys from those… motivated by personal feeling to ease their conscience from wrongful acts against others.
Go fig.
And that wraps up the “budget receipts.” But there are a whole bunch of other
receipts that apparently aren’t budgetish. This includes $12 billion in
interest on money the government has lent out, for instance to other countries
or the international monetary fund. And there’s $3½ billion in dividends on
investments it makes via funds it controls and is allowed to invest (e.g. the
national railroad retirement fund). It brings in $4 billion in royalties &
rents on public lands, for instance when it leases mining, harvesting, or
grazing rights. It gets nearly a billion for actually selling stuff — such as
timber, mineral products, or power (for example, the government owns the
Tennessee Valley Authority, so if you pay your electric bills to them, you’re
contributing to the profits of a government-owned utility, and therefore to
the federal budget).
In addition to those sales, there’s another $16 billion in sales of government property — almost entirely sales of military equipment to foreign countries.
The government also “sells” insurance, collecting $50 billion in medicare premiums, and another $12 billion or so in other stuff, including the new medicare prescription drug scheme, nuclear waste disposal fees, and veterans life insurance.
There’s a $13 billion item called “negative subsidies & downward
reestimates” that I could make no sense out of, $2½ billion in miscellany, and
a negative billion worth of “receipt clearing accounts.” You tell me.
When you get to the bottom of that, you’ve got another $126½ billion in “proprietary receipts from the public” in addition to the “budget receipts.”
“But that’s not all!” Stick with me as I put on my straw hat and gesture with
my cane at the “Intrabudgetary Receipts Deducted By Agency.” What could these
be? I think they’re money that one government agency pays to another, that
have to be included as receipts to make the accounting come out right. As
such, I think we can safely ignore ’em.
After this comes “undistributed off-setting receipts” — $260 billion that seem to me mostly like more of the same, but it’s hard to tell.
There’s “interest received by trust funds” which I’m guessing is grouped near the previous bunch because the interest is being paid by the government and the funds are being invested in Treasury securities, but perhaps not.
There’s also $6¾ billion in rents and royalties on the outer continental shelf and about the same from the federal communication commission’s auctioning off of bits of the broadcast spectrum (an item that gets duplicated in the list, so perhaps the money is doubled as well).
From here, we hit the final item: “offsetting governmental receipts” — that is
to say “regulatory fees” and “other”. The first is over $6 billion worth of
fees for things like “mobile home inspection and monitoring,” “pipeline
safety,” “bankruptcy oversight,”, “student and exchange visitors” and
“immigration user fees.” The latter only comes to $27 million, so I won’t
dwell.
Whew!
And that doesn’t even cover the various state governments and other sub-franchise operators that the federal government authorizes to take our money from us (or to run monopolies like the state lotteries).
And it also doesn’t count the various ways the government can compel us to labor directly for it (rather than supporting it indirectly through money) — everything from prison labor and stop-loss orders, to the hours we spend filling out paperwork.
Nor is the hidden tax of inflation and the devaluation of government debt through its underreporting included here.
And the various government powers that have significant economic value — for instance the power of eminent domain, the power to print currency, the power to make the rules — don’t make the balance sheet.
The challenge will be to start with something like this and end with some sort
of a practical guide for people who want to boycott and divest from
Washington. Any ideas?
Edward Gresser, of Progressive Economy, takes a look at U.S. tariffs on imported goods and hopes for a rebirth of progressive free-trade populism, noting that these tariffs are “America’s most regressive tax”:
imported leather dress shoes are taxed at 8.5% while cheap sneakers are taxed at 48%; fancy cashmere sweaters are taxed at 4% while their acrylic cousins are taxed at 32%; and the same down the line for shirts, bras, handbags, bedware, dinnerware, jewelry, etc. — luxury items have tiny tariffs, while inexpensive mass-market items are hit with huge rates. These tariffs raised about $26 billion for the U.S. government last year.
This seems like an area where the Grover Norquist anti-tax conservatives, the aid-the-poor progressives, and the free-trade libertarians could and should come together.
Speaking of free trade, here’s another reason why you can’t trust governments to bring it about.
Check out this crazy story:
The U.S. props up its cotton industry with subsidies.
Brazil complained that this violates international free trade agreements.
So the World Trade Organization ruled that the U.S. must stop these subsidies.
The U.S. refused.
So the WTO said Brazil was entitled to penalize the U.S. by disregarding U.S. intellectual property rights (in other words, they could pirate or duplicate things that were copyrighted or patented by U.S. people or companies without penalty).
Did this make the U.S. back down?
Not quite.
Instead of ending subsidies to U.S. cotton, the U.S. government decided to extend these subsidies to Brazilian cotton manufacturers to mollify the Brazilians!
So American taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton manufacturers so that American politicians don’t have to cut off illegal subsidies to American cotton manufacturers.
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
While I’ve been delving through the archives of Gospel Herald, links have been backing up in my bookmarks.
Here are some that concern war tax resistance in the here-and-now:
The Trump administration has decided it enjoys provoking trade wars, which perhaps have the blessing of distracting them from getting their jollies by provoking real wars.
But the prime mechanism — tariffs — is also a revenue source for the government.
Which leads war tax resisters like Lincoln Rice to ask, are these tariffs for war? and if so, what can war tax resisters do about it?
Thirty-Eight Years of Refusal — Erica Leigh, Georgia Pearson, Larry Bassett, and Bill Ramsey review the history of the recently-closed Conscience and Military Campaign Escrow Account, which was responsible for coordinating tens of thousands of dollars in war tax redirection.
Counseling Notes — News about government policies towards war tax resisters, including the use of private debt collectors, IRS summonses, passport revocations, and a sharp decline in levies.
Colrain After 25 Years — A 25th Anniversary celebration of the actions surrounding the Corner/Kehler house seizure, coinciding with the New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters.
War Tax Resistance Ideas and Actions — Including the Maine War Tax Resistance Gathering, and obituary notices for war tax resisters Ray Gingerich and Naomi Paz Greenberg.
NWTRCC News — Including an announcement of the NWTRCC national gathering in Cleveland.
Adrienne Maree Brown writes about her war tax resistance in the wake of a wage levy, and reflects on the disadvantages of going it alone as opposed to resisting as part of a supportive group. Excerpt:
i still deeply agree with the politics that led to this action, but i know now that i didn’t do it the right way.
i acted as an individual, as if my singular act of rage should be respected, as if it could have meaningful impact on the systems of oppression that lead to the military spending i want to divest from.
it helped me sleep well at night, but it wasn’t tied into a collective strategy, a system of accountability around whether it was effective.
someday i hope to be part of larger direct action efforts around debt and taxes, but from this struggle i have learned in a most personal way the importance of the collective.
Is there a war tax resistance movement?
According to a pseudonymous author in a back issue of Conscience (the newsletter of the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign), “War tax resistance is real, but the war tax resistance movement is fiction.”
War tax resistance is a tactic, says the author, whereas movements coalesce around goals, so there will never be a war tax resistance movement, though there may be movements that incorporate war tax resistance.
Erica Leigh looks back at the Beit Sahour tax strike as it was covered at the time, in a two-part series of excerpts from Conscience (part 1 and part 2).
Leigh writes: “The tax resistance in Beit Sahour was due to a high level of community cohesion, organization, education, and solidarity, something that’s missing from our scattered war tax resistance organizing around the United States.
Most of our finest moments in US war tax resistance arose from such concentrated and dedicated efforts in a small geographic region, even when the total number of resisters was small.
Food for thought!”
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
Irlanda Jerez
Irlanda Jerez, a leader of the tax resistance movement in Nicaragua against the Ortega/Murillo tyranny, was arrested by masked police last July and has been held prisoner since then.
She has said she has been drugged while in captivity, and the latest reports from her family say that she has been beaten so badly by her captors that she is currently bedridden.
Torture, arbitrary arrests, and repressive brutality are frequently relied upon by the regime, amounting to “crimes against humanity,” according to Amnesty International.
The pace of destruction of automated traffic ticket radars in France has slowed, perhaps just indicating that the low-hanging fruit have already been taken (as the government had stopped repairing frequently-targeted radars).
Still:
12 of the 42 radars in Indre-et-Loire are completely out of service.
Eight of those were set aflame.
Of the remaining thirty, these are regularly covered with bags or otherwise masked so that they don’t work.
At any time, more than half are not operating.
The radars issued less than half as many tickets last year than they had the year before.
You are a war-tax resister.
How did you come to that decision, and what have its consequences been?
Julia Butterfly Hill:
About 10 years ago I sued three corporations for creating an ad using my image without my permission to sell a hand-held wireless device.
I wasn’t looking for personal gain — I was planning to give all the money away — but I felt that their using my life and my work to promote consumption was against everything I stood for.
We settled out of court, and I found out that I would have a federal tax liability of about $175,000 on the settlement.
Everyone told me just to pay it, but I couldn’t stomach it.
This was right as the Bush administration was beating the war drums after September 11. I marched in the streets in San Francisco with hundreds of thousands of other people, and we shut down the Federal Building and the financial district.
We caused creative mayhem all day.
In the back of my mind the whole time was the thought that all these hundreds of thousands of protestors were eventually going to go home and feed with their tax dollars the very same machine they were protesting.
I made the decision that day that I was not going to give that $175,000 to the IRS.
It turned out to be the largest single instance of war-tax resistance in history.
There’s never been a larger single nonpayment of taxes in protest of a war.
Defying the IRS
is a scary prospect, so I took my time.
I did my research.
I went to the national War Resisters League, and I talked to people who had done war-tax resistance.
I did everything I could to educate myself and keep the people I work with safe, because they were not signing up for the same choice.
I took myself off all the governing boards I was on, including the one for my own organization, because my presence on the board could hurt it.
I took myself off salary at my own organization.
I did whatever I could to protect the people I work with.
And then I filed my taxes.
Along with my nonpayment I wrote a letter that said I was not
refusing to pay my taxes — I was redirecting them.
I’m not against paying taxes.
I believe in what we can do when we pool our money together for the collective good.
But the same is true for the collective bad, because our taxes were being spent not only toward war in Iraq but toward war on this planet.
With penalties, interest, and fees, I now owe more than four
hundred thousand dollars.
I cannot own anything, or the IRS will take it.
I face jail every single day.
Although they’re not technically allowed to throw people in prison for not paying their taxes, because we don’t have debtors’ prisons anymore, they could take me to court and claim I’m evading my taxes, which I’m not.
I’m consciously redirecting my money to causes I believe in.
The IRS
hasn’t gone so far as to file formal charges, but they have taken me to tax court twice now to try to scare me into submission.
They don’t seem to realize that trying to scare me into submission doesn’t work.
The MOON:
How come? It works on just about everyone else.
Hill:
[Laughs.]
You know, my father came out to California while I was
doing my tree-sit and gave a press conference.
He said, “If Maxxam Corporation thinks they can outwait my daughter, they don’t know my daughter very well.”
If you try to threaten or scare me, it only makes me more
determined.
If Maxxam Corporation had left me alone, it’s quite possible I might have given up before they did.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t have, but I do know that their harassing me and degrading me in the press — all the things they did to try to make me come down — only deepened my commitment.
The same is true with the IRS.
I didn’t decide to become a tax resister lightly.
I knew going into this that it would alter the rest of my life; that I would have to be creative in providing for my own needs.
I knew that I was risking prison.
So the threats from the IRS didn’t take me by surprise.
They only strengthened my resolve.
The MOON:
Do you have attorneys who represent you when you have to go to tax
court?
Hill:
I did at the beginning.
I wanted to make sure I’d done everything
correctly, so that it was clear that I am not evading my taxes but redirecting them.
I wanted to demonstrate that I was making this choice with the utmost integrity.
But I don’t have the money to keep paying for lawyers.
If they were to drag me back into court now, I’d probably go without one, because I understand my legal rights as well as the risks of representing myself.
Trump’s tariffs, in addition to being economically foolhardy and otherwise ridiculous, are also something of a conundrum for war tax resisters.
It is difficult to discover how much of one’s purchases are going towards these taxes that are largely hidden from the end-consumer.
At NWTRCC’s blog, Lincoln Rice begins an investigation into the current state of tariffs.
Some tabs that have slid across my browser in recent days:
International Tax Resistance
A driver in Saudi Araba films himself attacking a traffic ticket robot with a pistol.
You may remember that Indian Prime Minister Modi abruptly removed high-denomination bank notes from the ranks of legal tender in . This was meant to strike a knockout-blow at the underground economy by forcing people to use more legible, traceable economic transactions than anonymous cash. It doesn’t seem to have worked. Despite the significant short-term inconvenience and blow to the economy, the amount of cash currency in circulation quickly recovered to its previous levels and is now back on-trend to where it was before the experiment. You may have heard calls to eliminate the U.S. $100 bill, for similar motives. This experience may discourage such an effort.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee held a national conference in Washington, D.C. .
Here’s a write-up by one of the attendees. Unfortunately they got tangled up in ongoing actions by leftist activists who were trying to occupy the Venezualan embassy there on behalf of the brutal, disastrous Maduro regime.
It has been a disappointing thing to see groups like NWTRCC, CodePink, Veterans for Peace, and United for Peace and Justice carrying water for the cruel Maduro tyranny as though that were the only way to oppose disingenuous U.S. machinations there.
It puts a shameful stain on what’s left of the U.S. peace movement every time a group like this uses a phrase like “the legitimate democratic Maduro government of Venezuela”.
A number of items that have been in the news lately concern how the U.S. tax system has become increasingly corrupt and imbalanced in favor of wealthy tax evaders.
Stories like this tend to damage what’s known in tax wonk circles as “taxpayer morale” — the willingness of citizens to pay their taxes without evasion or the necessity of harsh arm-twisting and draconian oversight.
For example:
The New York Times pointed out that in California, local governments and corporations have rigged the sales tax system in such a way that a portion of the sales tax people pay is gifted to the same companies who collect it.
In other words, the sales tax becomes a “bonus profit” to those companies, collected from consumers and enforced by law.
Millions of former U.S. tax filers appear to have dropped out — not filing returns in the last filing season.
One theory is that the tax reform legislation that came into effect last year caused some people to owe where they hadn’t before, or to owe more, and that they decided not to file as a result.
Three million people who received refunds in didn’t file at all in .
There’s been another report put out about the “tax gap” (the difference between what’s owed and what’s collected) in the U.S.
However it still uses largely stale numbers, updating them largely based on estimates and trends rather than evidence.
Yesterday I was on a panel concerning “Resisting Taxes in the Trump Era” at the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s spring gathering.
Below is a summary of my remarks:
We can no longer reliably extrapolate from long-standing precedent about how the government operates, or how it responds to tax resisters, to anticipate the near future.
While past tax policy changes have been slow, gradual, and predictable, near-future changes are likely to be abrupt, arbitrary, and unstable.
This presents us with new challenges but also new opportunities.
I want to consider five areas the war tax resistance movement in the U.S. should be aware of, observant about, and prepared for.
But it’s too early to draw strong conclusions about any of them:
Changes at the IRS
The possible end of the federal income tax
Expanded government information-sharing
Anti-Trumpery tax resistance
How to resist tariffs
Changes at the IRS
First: the IRS is being significantly degraded and is in disarray.
There have been four acting IRS commissioners already in the first four months of the Trump Administration, serving between four days and six-and-a-half weeks each.
There is no Senate-confirmed commissioner.
In addition there have been thousands of dismissals of probationary IRS employees, and many others have accepted buyout offers to retire early.
Furthermore, the recently-released presidential budget assumes a further 25–50% headcount reduction at the agency.
The enforcement & collection branches have not been spared from this slaughter.
The agency was already on-the-ropes before all this happened.
For years they have lost headcount and their budget has dwindled, even as their responsibilities and the number of taxpayers has increased.
There was briefly some hiring and a budget boost at the agency during Biden’s term, but that hardly had begun to take effect before Trump’s crew came in and eviscerated it.
As a result, we can predict that the already feeble agency will be further incapacitated.
Second: there has been a collapse of the post-Nixon consensus that put a firewall between IRS enforcement and political appointees.
For the last 50 years it would have been considered a serious taboo for the president or one of his political appointees to try to go to the IRS and say “you should audit so-and-so; I think they’re up to something (or: I don’t like them).”
IRS enforcement decisions were firmly in the hands of career IRS employees, not political appointees.
Trump is putting an end to that.
He’s put a political appointee in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.
He’s being aggressive in using his powers to punish political enemies or to shake down deep-pocketed victims.
We can expect that he will use the IRS in this way, too.
Will this affect American war tax resisters?
Probably not right away.
I don’t think we’re on Trump’s enemies radar, and we’re not attractive shakedown targets.
But if tax resistance becomes a more prominent part of the anti-Trumpery movement, then, yes: expect politically-motivated reprisals.
The possible end of the federal income tax
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he plans to replace the IRS with an “External” Revenue Service, and replace income taxes with tariffs.
Of course, Trump claims a lot of things, and that’s never been a good reason to take those claims seriously.
But there are some other lines of evidence that suggest this may be for real.
Trump’s nominee for IRS Commissioner, Billy Long, when he was in Congress, co-sponsored legislation to abolish the IRS and replace the federal income tax with a sales tax.
This idea of replacing income taxes with consumption taxes has been floating around conservative circles for decades, but hasn’t had enough traction to go anywhere yet.
The “serious people” mostly ignore these proposals as being too onerous to accomplish and too likely to go very badly, but Trump shows strong signs of being willing to do very disruptive things and to not care much if they’ll go badly, so I think we have to consider the possibility.
This is not something Trump could do directly by fiat.
Congress would have to act to eliminate the federal income tax or the Internal Revenue Service.
But potentially Trump could force their hand by 1) unilaterally enacting tariffs, as he can do and has done, and 2) making the IRS so dysfunctional that it can no longer effectively collect income taxes, as he seems to be doing.
At that point, Congress might be faced with a fait accompli and might believe that if it wants to continue to have a budget to spend, it must allow Trump to raise tariffs (or other consumption taxes) to make up for what the IRS is unable to collect.
This is probably not happening right away.
The current Trump budget and tax proposals are for income tax cuts and for cuts to the IRS but not elimination of either.
Where would this leave war tax resisters, who tend to concentrate on the federal income tax as the most important source of war funding?
We would have to retool to resist these new taxes in new ways. (More on this below.)
Expanded information-sharing among federal agencies
A variety of legal firewalls, bureaucratic hurdles, and incompatibilities have prevented federal government agencies from sharing information with each other.
Some of that fell away during the consolidation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.
Now many of the remaining firewalls seem to be dropping to DOGE.
Most news I’ve seen about this is in the immigrant-crackdown context.
For example, the IRS is sharing info from people’s tax returns, and the postal service is sharing information about people’s mailing addresses, to help ICE find immigrants to deport.
Potentially this could make it easier for the IRS to find assets or previously shadowy income.
There’s no sign that this is happening yet, and it would be yet another task for a gutted IRS to try to tackle, so maybe it’s unlikely, but it’s worth keeping on the radar, and we should raise the alarm if anyone notices anything.
Anti-Trumpery tax resistance and war tax resistance
There’s a lot of eagerness among anti-Trumpery activists for some strong, collective action, which could include tax resistance (see for example the National Tax Strike under the Choose Democracy umbrella).
Where does the war tax resistance movement fit in?
Anti-Trumpery tax resistance isn’t “war” tax resistance.
Sure, you can stretch “war” metaphorically to cover deportations, civil liberties collapse, evasion of due process, Constitutional crisis, willful malgovernance, fascism, white supremacy, and so forth, but it’s awkward.
Most of NWTRCC’s outreach and educational material assumes that war and militarism are the focal concern of tax resisters, and to these new resisters this has the potential to be alienating at worst or confusing at best.
Of course, if Trump invades Greenland or Canada or something, then the anti-Trumpery movement will probably develop a strong anti-war focus, and then war tax resistance rhetoric will fit right in.
I suppose we can’t rule that out.
It’s an encouraging sign that the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund mutual aid program now explicitly welcomes anti-Trumpery tax resisters as well as traditional war tax resisters.
Maybe we can learn from the process they went through as they decided to become more accommodating to a new set of resisters.
Correction: the WTRPF board has since released a statement that says they are not going to extend the fund to cover tax resisters who are not resisting from anti-war motives.
I had based what I said here on a statement from a member of the WTRPF board who apparently misstated the position of the organization.
How to resist tariffs
Trump would seemingly prefer that tariffs permanently make up a predominate portion of federal government income (and therefore military budget income), as they did in the 19th century.
How could war tax resisters continue to resist if this were to come to pass?
Tariffs are taxes that apply to imported goods and that are paid by the U.S. importer.
So you can resist to some extent simply by not importing anything so that you personally do not pay the tax.
But the typical American is going to be paying tariffs indirectly as a consumer of goods whose prices include the costs of tariffs to the importer or manufacturer.
Note that tariffs apply not only to consumer-ready goods (like imported cars) but also to imported raw materials and intermediate manufacturing goods.
For this reason, the prices of many “domestic” products will embed tariffs just as much as do imported ones.
A tax resistance strategy of consuming only “Made in the U.S.A.” domestic goods will not be effective.
Some tactics that might be worth considering if tariffs make up a large amount of military income include:
Smuggling: if tariffs are high, smuggling will become highly profitable and will certainly emerge. We can help nourish that and can redirect our own consumption to smuggled goods.
Domestic manufacture: try to produce and market goods that deliberately and carefully avoid tariffs. Spread awareness about tariff-free goods.
Promote avoidance strategies: there will certainly be loopholes that can be exploited to reduce or eliminate tariffs; we can help importers learn about and use them.
Disrupt the tariff-collection bureaucracy: anything we can do to make the tax collectors’ work more difficult and less efficient will give the Pentagon less to play with.
These tactics (or similar ones) apply also to other consumption taxes that might be in the cards (e.g. a sales tax or use tax).
