How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies

P.S. There’s a good article that was posted to AlterNet today called “War Tax Resistance Made Simple.” It talks about the various forms of tax resistance — from going on strike like I’m doing, to filing “zero returns” or blank forms, to symbolic withholding of some portion of what is demanded, to resisting a particular excise tax (for instance the federal phone bill tax).

I also found an older AlterNet article today on “The ‘New’ Economy” that is an interesting look at the underground, or “shadow” economy:

The National Center for Policy Analysis points out: “Economists estimate that as many as 25 million Americans earn a large part of their income from underground activities.”

While economists have long estimated that the U.S. underground economy equals about 10 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), there are reasons to believe the number may be larger. According to a recent International Monetary Fund survey of 21 countries, the shadow economy has been growing for 30 years — the fastest in the 1990s — doubling from less than 10 percent of the GDP in 1970 to 20 percent or more by 2000.

“In the United States, for example, the shadow economy doubled from 4 percent of GDP in 1970 to 9 percent in 2000,” according to IMF.

But the Internal Revenue Service is taking a dim view. The IRS recently estimated that the federal government is losing $195 billion per year in revenue due to underground activity — both legal and illegal. In addition, it estimates the underground economy is anywhere from 3 to 40 percent of the above ground economy.

Some notes from the National War Tax Resistance Coördinating Committee conference:

The Patriot Act was big on the agenda of the conference today. Steve Bingham of the National Lawyers Guild summed things up by saying in his introduction to the topic: “We have historically had a relatively high level of personal liberty in this country. This is no longer the case.”

What does that mean to activist groups, particularly those that, like NWTRCC, advocate civil disobedience? Well, it’s disturbingly easy to find yourself lumped into the legal category of “domestic terrorist organizations.” Once there, you’re fair game for a lot of government persecution that used to be considered a gross violation of inalienable rights.

So basically, any activist group runs the risk of being successful enough to actually be an obstacle to the government, and as Bingham said: “The minute your organization begins to be effective, they do have the tools and the power to do what it takes to stop you.”

But the news wasn’t all ominous and frightening. A lot of what went on at the conference was people telling their stories — how and when they became a tax resister, how they’ve chosen to do their tax resistance, and what sort of things have happened along the way.

Some folks have been at this for twenty or thirty years. And the varieties of tax resistance are many, including:

• Moral and Practical Support — This can include signing petitions in favor of tax resisters, contributing to their legal defense, helping to pay their fines and interest penalties if the IRS comes after them, attending in protest if their property is auctioned off, and that sort of thing.
• Peace Tax Fund Activism — Some people are trying to get a law passed that would create the equivalent to “conscientious objection” for taxpayers. Whereas conscientious objectors to the draft are drafted into positions that do not directly participate in killing, conscientious objectors to war taxes would pay their taxes into a special budget that is not used for war. I have my doubts, but some people are convinced that this is where it’s at.
• Pay Under Protest — This can range from simply attaching a letter to your 1040 explaining why you wish you weren’t paying taxes, to sending in a check the size and shape of a coffin lid, to paying your taxes in pennies.
• Phone Tax Resistance — Some people refuse to pay the federal excise tax on their phone bill. This was a “temporary” tax that started in 1898 to help finance the Spanish-American war, and, as so many temporary taxes do, became an immortal vampire. The advantage of resisting this tax, which is done simply by reducing the check you send to the phone company by a small fraction (and maybe including a letter of explanation), is that it’s easy to do and almost nobody’s ever gotten any grief from the IRS for it. The disadvantage is that it’s really just a tiny little symbolic act — like sticking out your tongue at the firing squad. Some phone companies, notably Working Assets Long Distance, accommodate tax resisters with their own process; for others it takes some work to convince them that you’re not just shorting them on their bill.
• Symbolic Resistance — This includes things like sending the IRS blank forms, or forms marked with zeroes, or torn up forms, or forms with officially unrecognized deductions, or hyperbolic claims of five billion dependents, or withholding $10.40 or $17.76 from the amount due — that sort of thing. The IRS has a new tool against these protesters — a $500 fine for filing a “frivolous” form.
• The “frivolous” form fine also applies to just about everybody who tries the Constitutional Argument approach. This includes arguments that the first amendment freedom of religion clause prohibits the government from forcing people to fund government projects that are contrary to their religious beliefs, that the fifth amendment protections against self-incrimination prohibit the IRS from demanding that people reveal the details of their financial lives, that the United States as a signatory to the United Nations and a prosecutor of the Nuremberg Principles is bound to respect people who cannot pay for violations of these principles, or that the constitutional amendment that gave us the income tax in the first place wasn’t ratified correctly. I like to call this the Bullwinkle (“that trick never works”) Method. But there was a fellow at the conference who’d been doing this for a few years.
• The Make-’em-take-it Method — Some people refuse to hand over their taxes voluntarily, but don’t try to hide their assets (or to avoid having any to hide). After a while, the IRS gets around to seizing their bank accounts, garnishing their wages, or auctioning off their property.
• Resisting the War Budget Only — Some people refuse to pay just that portion of their income tax that corresponds to the percentage of the federal budget dedicated to paying for wars (past, present and future). The War Resisters League estimates that 47% of your income tax pays for war.
• The Hide-the-Assets Method — There are all sorts of sneaky ways to make money and own stuff without the IRS being able to get their hands on it. Offshore tax havens and clever trusts aren’t just for the rich. And some people find a way to work for cash only and never report their income. Other folks just try to make sure that there’s nothing for the IRS to seize when they show up — by hiding their savings, having their assets held by other people or by trusts and other legal entities, etc.
• The Too-Poor-to-Tax Method — (That’s me.) A lot of people are going this route. This also has the advantage of lowering the excise taxes you pay (since, with less money, you’re spending less on gasoline, booze, ammunition, luxury cars, vaccines and stuff). Furthermore, it harmonizes with some people’s desire to have a smaller planetary “footprint.” One person at the conference said that according to her calculations, if everyone on earth used up resources at the rate that a fairly conscientious American like she did, we’d need three-and-a-half planets to provide for us all.

Some people who hold back taxes donate the money instead to charity; others set the money aside in an account to be used later if the IRS comes after them. Still others don’t want to have any fund that the IRS might have the opportunity to seize, and also don’t see any reason to change the amount of money they donate to charity based on what their 1040 would say.

People have different goals in mind when they start on their tax resistance also, and this affects which techniques they decide on. Some are doing tax resistance as a protest, and so it is important that the government (and perhaps the press and the general public) know that they’re resisting. Some others are hoping eventually to make tax resistance a mass movement that forces concessions from the government. Others are less interested in the protest aspect of it, or the possibility of changing the government’s actions by defunding it, and more interested simply in not being complicit in the government’s behavior.

At one point in the conference, someone suggested another possible technique: Far fewer low-income folk take the Earned Income Tax Credit than are eligible for it. Tax resisters could successfully take a lot of money out of the government’s budget simply by counseling people on how to take this credit. The IRS intends to make it more onerous to successfully apply for this credit next year, so such counseling is that much more important.

Over all I was very encouraged by the conference. It was a very friendly group of people with a positive outlook and a lot of experience to draw on.

I have this mostly unformed, recurring fantasy that the anti-war movement one day decides to wholeheartedly adopt war tax resistance as a tactic. The new message is that everyone in the movement is a tax resister — if you don’t resist, you’re playing for the wrong team. People even wear patches or ribbons or something to make visible their commitment. Maybe there’s even some sort of ritual that takes place as people join this new order: the “Defunders of the Feith” or some such.

So that everybody can take part, even the timid or those with more to lose by stepping out-of-line, there’s a graded menu of options for people to choose from. To be a one-star Defunder, you must choose a certain number of items from list A; a two star Defunder adds to that a selection from list B; and so on. The idea being that anyone can be a one-star war tax resister, and there’s no excuse not to be if you’re at all sympathetic to the idea of defunding the war machine.

I dunno… it just might work, but it seems a little too regimented for the anti-war movement I know. But what’s a blog for if not to share half-baked ideas. What would you add to this list?

I’ve often mentioned the “Lucky Duckies” — of which I’m a proud member — those citizens who are living under the income tax line. But today it’s time to give a shout-out to those few thousand Americans who really know how to play the game: The Nontaxpaying Affluent.

According to the IRS, there were 5,650 “high-income” Americans who paid no federal income tax in 2002. “About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000.”

For two years I was able to claim, nay boast, that this was the only blog on all of the internets to specialize in news, opinions and resources for the conscientious tax resister community. Now I’ll have to be content with being the first: there’s a new kid on the block — War Tax Resistance by Jessica Ramer from Florida.

Posts are somewhat few and far-between, but there are some interesting ideas explored there, for instance:

• Ramer recommends paying cash whenever possible. This has a couple of advantages: First, it allows whomever you are paying to fail to report the payment as income if they choose (with credit cards, the paper trail makes this more risky) and thus lower their taxes. And second, it generates less profits for the credit-card-issuing banks, which Ramer says are among “the most powerful groups in American society, without whose acquiescence the war could not occur.”
• Ramer also advocates charitable donations, not only for their tax deductability but because they “serve to strengthen civil society — the sum total of social activities not connected to the government.”
• Another contributor to the site wrote in with this pithy observation about anti-war protests: “The lack of information among our political leaders about public opinion is not the cause of war — but that is the only problem protesting attempts to solve.”

Ramer is using legal methods of reducing her income tax — what I’ve dubbed the “Don’t Owe Nothin’ Method” here. She writes:

The beauty of tax-reduction strategies is that they are moral on all levels. By saving for retirement with tax-free dollars, you have benefited not only yourself but younger people who would otherwise sacrifice to care for you. Wisely invested, this money can create economic growth and increased prosperity. Charitable donations can be used to strengthen organizations that act as a counterweight to the state and make your community more pleasant and livable. Most importantly, you are not spending your wealth to blow the arms off of Iraqi children.

Most of the examples in today’s Picket Line can be found in greater detail in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation. In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.

Here are some of the examples I found:

1. Tax resister “insurance”

   For instance, the Breton Association in 19^th century France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”

   Another example was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in 1930s Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal battle against the tax.

   American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the IRS. The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal amount.

   The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up [the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement.”

2. Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.

   Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities. Whiteway Colony was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the Bijou and Agape communities live below a taxable income so as to avoid paying taxes.

3. Supporting resisters as an employer

   Some members of the Restored Israel of Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were resisting taxes.

   Vivien Kellems refused to withhold taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”

   Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.”

4. Disrupting auctions of seized property

   Earlier this year I recounted a dramatic and successful example of the American group “Peacemakers” blocking the sale of Ernest & Marion Bromley’s seized home.

   British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized for tax refusal.

   Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown in’ by the auctioneer.”

5. Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail

   Jessica Ramer and a Claire Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether or not to declare the income.

   Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.

   (100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)

   You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.

6. Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions

   Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging IRS seizures:

   The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.

7. Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products

   Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth, alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition, and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed, non-foreign-monopoly salt.

   An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on alcoholic beverages).

8. Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses

   One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:

   Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.

   These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.

   Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda, reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.

9. Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
   • Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,

     The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,” “tax-gatherers and Gentiles,” “tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.

   • A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution. John Adams wrote:

     At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.

   • Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:

     [W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:

     Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.

10. Violently resist tax collectors, disrupt trials/auctions, intimidate collaborators

    Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this, governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently, percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which only increases the resentment of those being collected from.

    During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.

    The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.

    The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.

11. Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters

    If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of taxed British imports by declaring that

    …we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.

12. Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics

    In mid-19^th century Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:

    The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.

13. Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters

    The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings, you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which tax collector.

14. Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests

    When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.

    During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax resisters. In early 1968, for instance, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.

    This year’s 2008 War Tax Boycott, Don’t Buy Bush’s War, and Pledge for Peace campaigns also have a public-signing component.

    Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many large-scale tax resistance campaigns.

15. Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee

    Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister alternative funds function partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.

    When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs as he was picketing the IRS office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”

16. Keep in contact with resisters and express support

    After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the IRS as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across the country.

17. Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making

    Here there are too many examples to list.

18. Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers

    When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that “The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.”

19. Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters

    The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”

    Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:

    Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed? They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.

    They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.

    And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe. You look, well, dignified.”

    That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.

20. Support the families of imprisoned resisters

    When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”

21. Study the law, give legal support

    When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”

22. Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways

    Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television on United States involvement in Central America, and a people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”

Can you think of any I’ve missed?

There’s something called Wolfekipedia out there on the web. It’s a project of the community that has formed around the thought and work of Claire Wolfe, which is to say that it’s got a libertarian bent, of the I’m off the grid and you can have my guns when you take them from my cold dead hands variety, not the suit-and-tie if only the government would privatize the prisons variety.

They’ve reproduced my “22 ways to work together to help tax resisters” bit on a page there. With any luck, folks will continue to brainstorm and improve some of these ideas. Anyone who signs up at the wiki can edit it. Have at it.

This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce their support of the government in these areas.

Active Methods of Depleting Government Coffers

Description

Anti-war activists turn to war tax resistance for any of a number of related reasons: to amplify their protest, as a form of conscientious objection, or as an attempt to reduce the resources available to the government to carry out its wars.

If you are motivated by the last of these motivations, you may also be interested in more active ways of reducing government coffers that go beyond refusal to consent to taxation.

Some of these methods go pretty far afield from war tax resistance, and so this page only mentions them in passing as examples of ways some resisters at some times have chosen to actively deplete government resources that might otherwise be spent on war.

Examples

Filing Paper Returns

These days, more and more people are filing their income tax returns electronically. This saves the IRS money, as it costs about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper return. You can reduce the efficiency of the government’s tax system, and thereby the amount of collected taxes available for the government to spend on the military, by filing paper returns rather than filing electronically.

George Jakabcin, the IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration, said that if half of the people who currently file electronically switched back to paper filing, “we would be in a world of hurt. We no longer have the capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually. We no longer have the facilities, we don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some would begin to argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”

In addition, the IRS is less able to track the items on paper returns, which limits the amount of data available to its enforcement arm. Until everyone (or almost everyone) switches to electronic filing, much of the information on everyone’s tax return is unavailable to the IRS’s automated compliance checking programs. By filing a paper return, you help diminish the ability of the IRS to go after tax resisters and evaders.

Disabling Tax-Collection Equipment

During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists in the United States interfered with military conscription by destroying the files at draft boards. War tax resisters might respond to the financial conscription of war taxes in an analogous way.

Many historical populist tax resistance movements have included actions intended to disable or destroy the tax collecting apparatus. For example:

• A group in Arizona upset at automated traffic ticket-dispensing cameras dressed up in Santa suits and disabled the cameras by wrapping them in gift boxes.
• Jack-a-Lents and “Rebeccaites” in England and Wales destroyed toll booths.

Harassing Tax Collectors

Another way of making the government’s tax collection process less-efficient and thereby making less money available to the government for war is to make the jobs of tax collectors more difficult.

• In 2009, when two war tax resisters in the Basque region of Spain were assessed a fine for their resistance, they paid the fine with 20,000 pennies.
• American revolutionaries famously used “tar and feathers” to show tax collectors they were not wanted.
• Many people in the American TEA Party movement sent tea bags in with their tax returns. This seems benign enough, but the IRS has seen so many dangerous-looking things come to its mailrooms (razor blades, powder meant to look like poison) that they tend to overreact and shut down their operations for a hazardous materials team to come inspect whenever they find anything out-of-the-ordinary in an envelope.

Applying for Government Handouts

Some resisters reason that it is not ethical to apply for government benefits and other handouts while at the same time trying to resist some or all federal taxes. Other resisters think that there is no contradiction between refusing to pay for war and taking advantage of other parts of the government. Still others think that any act that takes money from the government that it might otherwise spend on war is probably a good thing and they seek to maximize the amount of money they extract from the government.

Applying for Additional Tax Refunds

One way to take money out of the government’s pocket is to apply for tax “refunds” above and beyond any that you are legally entitled to.

During the Vietnam War, it was common for American war tax resisters to do this by declaring extra dependents on their tax returns. Martha Tranquilli, for instance, on her 1971 income tax return declared the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the War Resisters League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International League for the Rights of Man, and the American Friends Service Committee as her dependents. “By claiming these organizations,” she said, “this reduced my taxable income by about 60 per cent, which would go to war. These groups were entitled to my money. They were my dependents in as much as I support them.”

Now, with the expansion of the IRS’s use of the frivolous filing penalty, this approach is more daunting.

Some people, including many who are imprisoned in the U.S. prison system, simply fabricate tax returns with numbers optimized to maximize the amount of refundable tax credits and other refunds. For example, over a thousand prisoners made implausible claims for the “first-time home-buyer tax credit” on their returns and received over nine million dollars in refunds as a result. “I’m through with the street crime,” said prisoner Shawn Clark, “I’m strictly white collar from now on. I love the IRS!”

Keeping Bureaucrats Busy with Worthless Paperwork / Overcompliance

The more time, effort, and money the government wastes on paperwork and bureaucracy, the less time, effort, and money it has to devote to torturing prisoners, bombing weddings, and launching invasions.

In 1984, after the IRS hit war tax resister Karl Meyer with a “frivolous filing penalty,” he responded with what he called “Cabbage Patch Resistance” — filing a new and different tax return every day to flood the IRS with paperwork.

Destroying or Sabotaging Government Property

By destroying or sabotaging government property, you make it more expensive for the government to do business, and thereby reduce the amount of money it can spend on the activities, like war, it prefers to replacing damaged equipment. Property with a direct link to the military is a favorite target.

Anti-war activists around Shannon Airport in Ireland on a number of occasions disabled U.S. military aircraft that were using that airport to ferry troops and supplies to the Iraq War. For instance, Mary Kelly took an axe to a U.S. Navy 737, doing $1.5 million in damage, and Ulla Roder disabled a RAF Tornado fighter jet. Such activists have won surprising victories in court by convincing juries that they were acting on the basis of necessity.

Another group disabled 35 refueling trucks at the Fairford military base in England around the same time.

More recently, anti-war activists broke in to the ITT/EDO-MGM arms factory in Brighton, England to destroy equipment involved in the manufacture of parts for fighter jets and guided missiles and bombs. Operating under cover of night, the half-dozen decommissioners did about £250,000 in damage. A police inspector said that “machinery and equipment were so targeted that it could have been done with a view of bringing business to a standstill. The damage is significant and the value substantial.” They were acquitted. One reacted to the verdict by saying: “It’s a real victory for the anti-war movement, The jury were presented with the facts and they supported our motivations. If people in Britain knew the truth away from media manipulations they would all support our actions.”

In a similar action, another set of activists did £350,000 of damage at a Raytheon plant in Derry, Northern Ireland, and then were acquitted of all charges by a unanimous jury after they argued that they were acting to prevent war crimes. Raytheon’s U.S.-side managers concluded that “the legal system in Northern Ireland does not offer the degree of protection to their business that could be expected in other parts of the world,” and the company decided to abandon their Derry plant.

Encouraging Soldiers to Desert

Encouraging soldiers to desert or defy orders, supporting conscientious objectors, and counter-recruitment, are all ways of (among other things) making it more difficult and expensive for the government to maintain its ability to conduct wars. Groups like Courage to Resist and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors do great work in this area.

War tax resisters can be particularly credible messengers in trying to persuade military personnel to resist since we, too, are taking risks in our noncompliance. Conversely, we can help to influence those who promote conscientious objection in soldiers to practice it as taxpayers. As Thoreau complained: “The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.”

Resigning Government Jobs

By resigning your government job, even one which is itself fairly benign, you deprive the government of additional resources and force it to spend more on replacing you. You also signal your disgust with the government’s activities and your unwillingness to be associated with it. Gandhi and Tolstoy were among the theorists of nonviolent resistance who made resignation of government posts an important part of their strategic thinking.

Blockading Government Facilities

If you can prevent a government facility or that of a military contractor from operating, to that extent you can cost the war machine time, money, and other resources.

The ports in Tacoma, Washington, Oakland, California, and Olympia, Washington have been successfully blockaded on occasion by anti-war protesters to prevent the loading of ships destined for battlefields around the globe.

On the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in 2008, members of the War Resisters League were arrested blockading the IRS building in Washington. “Just as military recruiters supply bodies for the war, the IRS supplies the funding,” said war tax resister Ed Hedemann. “So, I’m doing my part in disrupting that relentless flow of money by standing in front of the IRS entrance and by refusing to send my taxes to the IRS.”

I’m going to be NWTRCC’s representative at the 14^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns in Bogotá, Colombia in February. The conference organizers have asked me to deliver a talk concerning the history of conscientious tax resistance.

So lately, a lot of the time I would otherwise be spending on The Picket Line, I’ve instead been spending on research and preparation for this talk, which I also hope to expand on for my next book.

The theme I’m working with is similar to one I used for a Picket Line post back in 2008: the variety of methods with which tax resisters and sympathizers have augmented and amplified their campaigns. At the time, I identified and briefly described 22 such methods. I’ve picked out another thirty or so since then and I’m still going through my notecards.

For each of these, to the extent that I can, I want to research how they were used by various historical tax resistance campaigns, and how they played out dynamically as the campaigns and their opponents developed their competing tactics.

My research so far has shown me a lot of repeating patterns in the ways tax resistance campaigns play out and in the ways they succeed and fail, and it seems to me that it would be useful for future campaigns to be able to quickly come up to speed on this history so as to better understand what to expect.