How you can resist funding the government →
my tax resistance →
media mentions of →
4 July 2007 Associated Press & followup
an article about war tax resistance went out over the Associated Press wire, and it’s showing up in newspapers and on news websites all over the country today.
I’m pictured, and featured in the opening paragraph, and as a result I’ve been getting fan mail and hate mail, which is all kind of fun.
The article itself is a pretty good overview that mostly follows what I’ve come to recognize as the standard template for these articles: quotes from a resister or two, the official estimate from NWTRCC about how many people do this sort of thing, some boilerplate from an IRS spokesperson about how it’s everybody’s duty to pay up, and maybe some historical context with Thoreau thrown in.
This is the first of these articles I’ve seen that sought out a contrasting quote from a pro-war / pro-tax activist (“They’re showing the terrorists that America is not committed,” he said, of the war tax resisters).
The blog world, shamelessly following the baton of the “MSM”, is full of articles debating war tax resistance .
It’s turning out to be an exciting day.
QuakerDave at The Quaker Agitator says:
“We have some folks at our Meeting who are involved in this movement, and I’ve heard and read about it off and on for years.
With The Suborner-In-Chief telling us yesterday that we need to be ‘patient’ with the war of empire now being fought in Iraq, to the tune of several years worth of ‘patience,’ maybe it’s time to look at it again.”
Scribe at Independent Christian Voice says
“Even though I am opposed to the Iraq War, I could not support this method of protest for a few reasons” and then explains these reasons.
The hosts of the libertarian-oriented Free Talk Live radio show (mp3; the tax resistance segment starts an hour and 47 minutes in) engaged in a vigorous discussion about issues raised the article.
Every bit as enthusiastic are the denigrators from the jingo battalion:
The Free Republic message boards jumped on the news, and last I checked, some 50 Freepers were competing with each other for the honor of making the most ignorant and opinionated comment.
JackLewis.net titles their discussion “Anti-war, hippies and deadbeats unite” and summarizes the article this way:
“A group calling themselves the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is urging Americans who oppose defending innocent Iraqis from being murdered by terrorists to stop paying any taxes in order to send a message to the government.”
Right News and Views says “It staggers the mind that someone would so tenaciously fight taxes to further the possibility of genocide in Iraq when there are plenty of real reasons for one to fight taxes.”
Texas Rainmaker joins the others in assuming that if I’m against the war and against paying taxes for it, I must be some sort of hypocritical lib’rul who’s happy to force other people to pay taxes so that transsexual Muslim illegal immigrants can collect welfare for aborting their children with a burning American flag.
I fielded calls from all over the country from radio hosts who wanted me on their shows — ranging from “progressive talk radio” to “let’s find a cheese-eating surrender monkey to yell at radio” — and lots of email as well.
I did one radio show, with John Scott on 960 (The Quake) — here’s the audio — and I thought that went well.
I don’t feel quite up to the shout-format shows, though.
The blog commentary continues:
Right Wing News lobs some dung in my direction, then speculates that maybe right-wing government-skeptics might want to get in on this tax resistance action, then gives that thought a partial-birth abortion.
Needs of the Many says of the “Anti-War Fruits [Who] Refuse to Pay Taxes” that “I disagree with their stance on the issue, but the idea that you can refuse to pay taxes to a government that will use your money on programs you don’t support is intriguing.”
The Chicago Tribune comes out with a tsk-tsk editorial that reads like it was written by a high school civics textbook editor in his sleep:
“If paying taxes was like ordering off a menu, most people wouldn’t eat their veggies.…
You can vote. You can run for office.
You can march up and down Michigan Avenue wearing a sandwich board and barking into a megaphone.
You can cover your car with anti-war bumper stickers, write your congressman, impeach the president, start a blog or bury your local newspaper in letters to the editor.
But pay up.”
And other tax resisters across the country have been fielding requests from various branches of the news media — mostly print and radio.
It’s “Tax Day in July” for the war tax resistance movement, which usually doesn’t get this kind of attention outside of mid-April.
The heated reaction in blog land to ’s Associated Press article on war tax resistance has cooled to a snarky simmer in the right-wing blogs.
For instance, Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush wonders “what Gross would say about someone in his San Francisco refusing to pay his city taxes over a moral objection to San Francisco providing sex-change benefits?
My bet is that liberals only consider war immoral.”
Then he goes on to make a more radical case for collective responsibility than I’m used to seeing in such places:
Be that as it may, I’d like to advise Mr. Gross that the only way he can be morally excused from future American actions is to renounce his citizenship and leave the country with absolutely nothing (yes, that includes no clothes… which might make entry into another nation difficult, but we’re talking about having perfect, liberal morality and so that is a small price to pay).
Mr. Gross can’t be excused from moral culpability for actions prior to such renunciation and departure no matter how much taxes he chooses to dodge — you see, in a democratic Republic, we all bear our aliquot portion of responsibility for each and every action of government.
Every time a soldier in Anbar pulls a trigger, each of us gains a bit of moral responsibility for where that bullet winds up — true, those who directly ordered the man to pull the trigger bear a larger responsibility than Mr. Gross, but Mr. Gross does bear his portion of responsibility.
Robbie at UrbanGrounds says in response to those who refuse to pay taxes because they don’t want to fund the Pentagon:
“I Don’t Think My Tax Dollars Should be Used to Fund the ACLU So I’m going to quit paying my taxes.”
When a commenter asks “Do you really not know that the ACLU is supported by its members and not your tax dollars?”
a hilarious song and dance begins…
The Central Shenandoah Valley News Leader editorial board got together, wrinkled their collective brow, and penned this editorial tsk-tsking war tax resisters.
They harumph and put on their best “after due consideration” voices give two reasons why they advise against tax resistance.
See if they seem as remarkable to you as to me:
Federal taxes pay for a myriad of programs besides defense.
Social programs should not suffer because of a well-intentioned but misguided desire to make a statement about war.
We expect that if the federal revenue streams were to suffer enough from widespread tax protests that the first programs to be cut in case of a shortfall would not involve defense or war funding.
It’s highly unlikely that most modern-day tax protesters will suffer the fate of Thoreau and wind up behind bars for their convictions — even as briefly as did Thoreau.
Instead of that outcome, it’s more likely that the Internal Revenue Service will get its pound of flesh one way or another, sooner or later.
Having one’s wages garnished is not a pleasant experience, and the less one earns the more painful it is.
Having a bank account or property seized proves nothing either.
It may take years, but the IRS will eventually find you and get the taxes owed, plus interest and penalties.
Add to that a new law that increases the fine from $500 to $5,000 for filing a “frivolous” tax return — the IRS’s catch-all term for anything other than a straight-ahead tax return — and all that is accomplished is to provide extra funding to the government to spend as they see fit.
Or, in summary: “Don’t resist taxes, because you’ll take money away from valuable government programs and you’ll end up giving more money to the government.”
Ah… newspaper editorial boards: self-important judas goats, putting a bullhorn before the semi-articulate bleating of Babbitt’s collective subconscious, as challenging as a beauty pageant speech.
Where would America be without their bold, ahead-of-the-curve ideas?
The Freewayblogger answers that frequently asked question in activist circles: “What can I do (that’s easy, safe, quick, and makes me feel all special without committing me to anything)?”
Anti-war activist and war tax resister Cindy Sheehan announced that she plans to go up against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the elections.
News reports suggest that rather than challenging Pelosi in the primary, Sheehan will launch a third-party or independent challenge for the House seat.
I was on the Alan Colmes radio show , answering questions from Colmes and his listeners during a half-hour segment on tax resistance.
I think it went very well.
The show is national, and judging by the callers, gets a large and enthusiastic audience — even when competing with the All Star Game.
Colmes, to his credit and my surprise, had done his homework by reading about my tax resistance ahead of time — not just the Associated Press article, but also the FAQ on The Picket Line, so he got impatient when I tried to recycle bits of it in my answers.
I’d turned down an offer to be interviewed on Fox television news earlier in the day.
I just felt icky every time I thought about it.
I’d had the same sort of foreboding at first when Colmes’s producer asked me to be on his show — on Fox television news, Colmes is the Colmes in their spin-and-shout show “Hannity and Colmes.”
But I listened to some of his radio show and thought it had a reasonably high substance-to-sensation ratio, so I accepted.
It turned out fine.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Alan Colmes radio show only releases audio files of parts of its shows in their on-line archives, and my part won’t be one of them.
John Christoffersen’s Associated Press article that started this whole media cyclone has now been translated into Spanish and French:
