[M]y annual voluntary forfeiture of money to my government pays for
violence around the globe, at astounding levels, and I am not able to
provide any more excuses or rationalizations that paying without protest,
that being complicit in funding war without resistance, is not
contradictory to my faith and to my conscience. Quite simply put, I can
no longer ignore the basic, yet just, wisdom and truth found in the war
tax resisters’ dictum: “If you work for peace, stop paying for war.”
As I have come to accept that I can no longer justify providing money to
my government to pay for the bombs and bullets our forces use to kill
millions abroad, or contribute to the funds that supply and resupply the
arsenals of our allies, such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as they
kill others and repress their own people, my choice to willfully not pay
taxes has crystallized. It has been aided, in great part, by the
testimonies of those who have practiced war tax resistance, in some
cases, for several decades, and who by their courage and dedication to
laws of love and peace have risked the authority of the federal
government to follow what is right. I am also indebted to peers like Rory
Fanning and Logan Mehl-Laturi and old friends, like
Count Leo Tolstoy, who, by
articulating their convictions, have helped not just to educate me, but
to embolden me.
This week, I am saying to the
U.S.
government: No more war with my tax dollars. I am refusing to pay the
$593 I owe in taxes, and have instead donated this money to important
community projects including a youth-led farm, an environmental justice
organization, and two community art projects.
Paula Rogge contributed a column to The Cap Times urging readers to “put tax dollars to work preventing war.” She writes: “Over the last 34 years I have filed my tax returns yearly, but redirected my federal income taxes to organizations that meet basic human needs and promote nonviolent conflict resolution.”
My local newsweekly, the New Times, covered my
tax resistance today: Snubbing Uncle Sam: Local resident touts tax resistance as protest.
They also did one of those we-ask-a-man-on-the-street sidebars where they
asked four people: “What
is your opinion on people who don’t pay taxes as a form of protest?”
and got surprisingly positive answers. I expect the typical
man-on-the-street to reach for the old familiar clichés about “who will fix
the roads if we don’t pay our taxes” and so forth, but three out of four
people who were asked supported tax resistance.
Steve Ballmer, ex-Microsoft CEO, has launched a new project — USA Facts — that is meant to be a thorough, non-partisan, unbiased source of information about government spending.
By non-partisan they mean “credulous and non-judgmental” and by unbiased they mean “exclusively relying on government sources,” so keep that in mind.
It’s naively cheery about the federal government, by design:
We soon discovered that dealing with something as big and complex as
government — with its more than 90,000 jurisdictions and 23 million
employees — required an organizing framework. What better place to
look than the Constitution, and, more specifically, the preamble to the
Constitution? It lays out four missions: “Establish justice, ensure domestic
tranquility; provide for the common defense; promote the general welfare;
and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” While
we don’t make judgments about policy, we all agree on the broad purposes of
government as laid out in the preamble to the Constitution.
That said, it may end up being a useful source for some information about taxes and spending.
NWTRCC has some follow-up on this year’s tax season:
Here’s a new item in the pay-under-protest file: Scott Dion paid his property taxes with a check that said “sexual favors” in the “Memo” field. The government has been refusing to cash it.
