How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
join cooperative housing and business arrangements →
The Bijou Community →
Mary & Peter Sprunger-Froese
There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
a look back at the life and work of Juanita Nelson with contributions from Bob Bady, Karl Meyer, Ginny Sсhnеider, Ed Hedemann, Lori Barg, and Ed Agro
some notes about trends in tax enforcement including IRS levies on royalty income, the sudden decline in property seizures for the past 15 years, phone tax resistance, and Elizabeth Boardman’s attempt to get some respect for war tax resistance in the courts
a note about the passing of Dirk Panhuis, who had been active with Conscience and Peace Tax International
some updates about war tax resisters Julia Butterfly Hill and Joseph Olejak, the Spring Rising anti-war action, Greg Wise’s mouthing off about tax refusal, and the Mennonite Central Committee’s war tax redirection program
news about tax day outreach on social media, at the U.S. Social Forum, at the Jewish Voice for Peace conference, and the Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship
Members of the Bijou Community were already involved in war tax resistance when Peter and Mary arrived.
Early on, money was held in common, but that evolved over the years to each doing their own thing.
One year the community did a tax protest and filed a 1040 saying they didn’t want to pay anything “because we don’t want to support the war.”
That seemed to trigger an audit, which took an exhausting six months of collecting receipts to convince the IRS that members were not living off donations that came in for the soup kitchen and houses of hospitality.
“The IRS said don’t file like that anymore because it messes up our system, and we said don’t audit us anymore because it messes up ours!”
David Hartsough is a Quaker and a War Tax Resister who has for decades been redirecting a large portion of his “tax obligations,” believing that if war is abolished, “humanity can not only survive and better address the climate crisis and other dangers, but will be able to create a better life for everyone.
The reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination.”
(Editor’s note: The 2016 U.S. budget for past, present, and future wars is $1,300 billion.)
He cofounded the Nonviolent Peaceforce, inspired in part by Gandhi’s idea of a shanti sena, a peace army, and this organization is now active in 40 countries, stationing trained professional peaceworkers in conflict areas around the globe and is sustained by an $8 million budget.
He works with World Beyond War and is currently executive director of Peaceworkers in San Francisco.
Waging Peace has been in the works for 27 years.
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.
