Earn less money so you owe less taxes and fund less of the government’s bad deeds, or earn more money so you can donate more to good causes and offset the damage done by your taxes? Such a decision becomes even more complex when your finances are entwined with those of a partner. Lindsey Britt thinks over her options at NWTRCC’s blog.
The Congressional Budget Office recently released its projections for what the U.S. federal government budget is likely to look like in the future based on current law and economic conditions.
It is an eye-opener.
Last year when they issued their report, they thought the U.S. government debt would be about 79½% of the nation’s gross domestic product, a number that raised eyebrows at the time.
But that was before the coronavirus.
Now they say the number will be upwards of 98% — a level the country has not seen since the all-out mobilization for World War Ⅱ.
And it just keeps climbing from there.
By 2050 it is projected to nearly double to 195%.
This is because government spending as a percentage of GDP is expected to rise, from “rising interest costs and the costs associated with an aging population and excess health-care cost growth”.
The federal budget deficit this year is projected to be $3.3 trillion, which is just freaking unprecedented.
“It is hard to overestimate what a dismal fiscal future the Congressional Budget Office foresees.”
Catalan separatists, on the other hand, seem to be turning up the heat.
They have identified a set of basic infrastructure companies that are in favor of Catalan secession and that are working to disentangle their Catalan operations from the Spanish state: companies in the telecom, energy, petrol, insurance, and banking sectors for example.
They are encouraging people in Catalonia to shift their consumption to those companies, and also to pay their federal taxes through the Catalan tax agency, as a way of easing the eventual transition to independence.
Some recent links of interest:
War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:
Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death.
But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.
The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity.
This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich.
And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government.
In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign.
Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign.
But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.
, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions.
It comes a couple of days before in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:
“I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”
War tax resister Sue Barnhart has a letter-to-the-editor in the Eugene Weekly. Excerpt:
I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder.
The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment.
Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.
War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Robin Brookes are hosting a discussion group at the upcoming World Beyond War #NoWar2021 conference on :
“War Tax Resistance:
Tax resistance to paying for the military began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day.
Let’s talk about the practicality and efficacy of refusing to pay for war.”
“I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity.
If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money.
I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”
The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.
Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for but had no intention of paying.
“They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on .
“Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes.
If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”
A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.
“I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets.
I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said.
“We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is spearheading a Democratic Party effort to expand and further empower the IRS.
“I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations.”
During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.
The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions.
At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.
The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with the robots taking casualties in Guadeloupe and France and in Italy in recent weeks.
There’s a roadblock to the Democrats’ plans to use increased IRS enforcement to bring in more money to pay for their ambitious federal budget:
The fact that under Congressional budgeting rules, increasing the IRS budget counts as an expense, but increases in tax revenue that might be expected as a result don’t offset that expense.
Which means Congress has to jump through extra hoops to justify that extra spending.
Republicans smell blood in the water, and suspect that beefing up such IRS tax enforcement might not be politically popular.
They hope they can exploit anti-tax-snoop sentiment to stymie Democratic spending priorities.
The IRS expects to lose 52,000 of its 83,000 employees to retirement over .
Hiring freezes and budget cuts have aged its workforce.
But now they’re going on a hiring spree to try to make up for it.
