A campaign urging people to stop paying their energy bills is taking off in the U.K., with promoters comparing it to the Poll Tax rebellion.
The Don’t Pay U.K. website is collecting signers to a pledge to begin refusing to pay on if the pledge gets a million signers.
As of they have collected over 108,000 signers.
The campaigners are reacting to recent increases in home energy bills and are demanding that the government reduce them to more affordable levels.
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
The IRS published a new estimate of the federal “tax gap” — the difference between the amount of taxes people legally owe and what they actually fork over.
The new estimate, which is based on data from the period, puts the tax gap at almost $500 billion dollars.
The government recovers some of that through nagging and enforcement actions, leaving about $428 billion that never gets captured.
I haven’t looked into the methodology by which these numbers were conjured up.
Several years ago I took a deeper look and found that these estimates typically did a lot of extrapolating from even older guesstimates.
It’s also the sort of calculation that must necessarily concentrate on “known unknowns” while the “unknown unknowns” remain in the shadows.
As a result, it’s the kind of number that ought to have broad error-bars around it, but for some reason it’s always reported as a single, precise amount.
Last time I checked in with the “Don’t Pay” U.K. campaign, it was collecting signers to a pledge to begin refusing to pay home energy bills on if the pledge were to get a million signers (they had collected 108,000 ).
When I look at their site to day, I see that they have pivoted a bit.
Now they claim that 256,924 people “have pledged to strike” on , and they don’t mention anything about a one-million-person threshold.
Spartacus Educational profiles Women’s Tax Resistance League pioneer Octavia Lewin.
Some recent links from hither and yon:
The “Don’t Pay U.K.” campaign has started.
People are refusing to pay inflated home energy bills and are organizing mutual aid to handle the repercussions.
Some coverage:
A group of people in the Netherlands called “Belastingstaking voor Klimaat” (“Tax Strike for Climate”) have decided to no longer “silently pay for global warming” via government subsidies of fossil fuels.
They are refusing to pay 5% of their income tax, as that is their rough estimate of how much of central government spending (and tax breaks) subsidizes CO2-generating companies: about €17.5 billion per year.
They are also using the official tax adjustment and appeals process to press their claims
The “Don’t Pay U.K.” has been ramping up its public protests. One of their tactics is to stage protests in warmed public buildings (to highlight how prohibitively expensive it is to heat their own homes). In one action, the protesters sang a song to the tune of Your Cheatin’ Heart including the lyrics “your heating chart will tell on you”.
American war tax resisters Robert Randall and Marjorie Nelson have died.
Randall was a regular participant at NWTRCC events like their periodic national meetings and the School of the Americas protests, and is one of a small, select group of war tax resisters who have had their homes seized by the IRS for their refusal.
Marjorie Nelson worked as a physician with a Quaker war relief program in Vietnam during the American war there, and survived 50 days as a prisoner of war after she was captured during the Tet Offensive.
In she tangled with the IRS in court after the agency hit her with a “frivolous filing” penalty for taking a “war tax deduction” on her tax return.
In response to a surge in Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship, the U.S. Department of State abruptly raised its fees for processing such renunciations from $450 up to $2,350 some years back.
Now, in response to a lawsuit by some expats who claim this amounts to unjust coercion and a violation of their 5th and 8th Amendment rights, Rina Bitter, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, told the court “the Department intends to pursue rule-making to reduce the fee for processing CLN requests from the current amount of $2,350 to the previous fee of $450.”
