Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
American conservative arguments for tax resistance →
Craig T. Nelson
I didn’t see much indication that folks in the “tea party” set, as upset as they were about the government putting us all more deeply into debt in order to shovel money around in its bailouts, were entertaining the next step: cutting off their own funding of the government behemoth.
But actor Craig T. Nelson was interviewed on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show yesterday, and he said that tax resistance is the way to go for folks who share his disgust with government spending priorities.
Excerpts:
NELSON:
Well, I do have a solution. There’s only one way. … As an investor, as
someone who gets taxed an awful lot, I just say “I’m not gonna pay,
’till you guys can show me that you’re fiscally responsible.” Until
then… listen, the first they went after education. We’re gonna cut
education…
BECK:
Why would they do that?
NELSON:
Why? That’s the most important thing in the world.
BECK:
And then cops and prisons.
NELSON:
And firefighters. We don’t have any fires in California.
BECK:
(Laughs)
NELSON:
…Listen, I’m not gonna pay… I’m not gonna pay any more money. What these
people are asking me to do…
BECK:
You’re seriously saying, “I’m not gonna” — you’re not gonna…
NELSON:
No, I’m asking Glenn Beck to promote this. I’m saying it personally.
But I’m asking you…
BECK:
No, I know. Are you saying you personally won’t pay income tax
anymore?
NELSON:
I’m really thinking about it, Glenn, because as a fiscally responsible
grandfather, there are programs that they’re asking me to fund that I
refuse to fund. If the veterans coming back are not getting what they
deserve, those people that have served, that’ve put themselves in harm’s
way. If my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchild who’s
about to be here — thank you, grandson — is not going to be educated
properly then I’m through with it. You know, I’m not gonna spend money
on these things that your asking me to spend… They should be allowed to
go bankrupt!
This part is kind of hilarious.
Check this out:
…They should be allowed to go bankrupt!
What happened — we are a capitalistic society.
OK, I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt.
They’re not going to bail me out.
I’ve been on food stamps and welfare.
Anybody help me out?
No.
No.
They gave me hope, and they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision.
That came from my education.
Did the government bail out Craig T. Nelson when he was on food stamps and welfare?
Hell no!
He relied on his good, old-fashioned, public education to get him through!
Later on, Nelson whipped out a copy of the Declaration of Independence and
read the part that reads, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments
long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and
accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accustomed.”
NELSON:
“But when a long train of abuses and transgressions [sic]…” And
I’ve had enough of it. So… The only way that I can protest in any
viable and visible form — for myself — is to say “I’m not paying you
right now.”
BECK:
Are you willing to go to jail for that?
NELSON:
I’m going to go to jail. But I still think it’s kind of a [mafia?]
deal because they’ve got a subcontractor who says… they’re extorting
me, and they’re saying “you’re going to pay us this amount” — what am
I going to pay now? 90% of what I make? I mean, I’ve got California…
federal and state. That’s unfair. That’s taxation without
representation.
BECK:
I think if the United States government takes over California’s loans,
I think it is taxation without representation — I couldn’t vote
for any of that. I couldn’t vote for that. You people in California
are saving the seal otters. And… and… I like saving people!
NELSON:
I like the sea otters.
BECK:
I like the sea otters too, but eh?
NELSON:
And those people who like the sea otters should pay for ’em.
BECK:
Yes.
NELSON:
But if I don’t want to save the sea otters… Is that
anarchy?
BECK:
No! This is American!
From there it disintegrated even further into incoherency.
The interview wasn’t all that comprehensible, even by modern television talk
show standards, and it isn’t all that clear whether Nelson is resisting taxes,
plans to resist, or is just making big talk at the barber shop. His talk of
having been contacted by a mafia-like
IRS
debt collection subcontractor suggests to me that he’s been resisting for a
while now, since it takes some time for a tax debt to go into collection and
since the
IRS
has recently discontinued its subcontracting of such accounts.
Beck summed it up for his viewers this way:
I’ll tell you [addressing Nelson], I think you’re the first person I’ve heard that is expressing the way I feel that, you know, you get to a point where you’re like “enough!
I’ll go to jail.
I will go to jail before I pay you another dime for this insanity!
Because you’re not responding… everybody in America knows this is crazy!”
A groundswell of tax resistance on the right?
Could be.
I’ll keep my ears up.
Hello, America. Here’s The One Thing. [sigh]
Going to… cause a lot of problems.
The government’s irresponsible spending is turning us into slaves. You might
well literally lock us into chains — at least our children.
USA Today — I
don’t know if you saw the front page of the paper
— that paper!: It reported
that if you add up all of the
federal debt that each American household now owes: $546,668. That is up 12%,
or $55,000, from . [Pantomimes checking
his watch] That’s four times what each
U.S. household
owes in car loans and credit cards, mortgages and all other debt combined.
Keep in mind: That’s the happy estimate. That’s if everything just keeps
going as smoothly as it is right now. What is that number look like if you
take an approach that’s not so sunshine and lollipops? They say that we can
just pay all this — don’t worry about it: we’re gonna grow our way out of
this, and you know what what — we’ll just tax that top 1 or maybe 5 or maybe
15, 25%.
To give you an idea how much money this is that we’re now on the hook for.
There are three possible options to pay this off:
If I took every single cent of
GDP for
this entire year and the next three years, we could pay it off.
Take 54% of all corporate revenues and all of the wages and salaries for
the next ten years, so nobody makes anything. Got it?
Or option three: Take two out of every three dollars of all the wages
and salaries paid
US residents
over the next ten years.
And remember things could get worse if the government wants to follow
through with this giant progressive plan for health care spending and
everything else.
There’s… you know there’s talk of a national sales tax? This is a spooky
thing this isn’t a sales tax like you ring it up — you never see this tax.
It’s called a
VAT tax — it’s
hidden. And when they implemented it in Europe that’s when spending went out
of control, because you never see it. Prices just rise 25% on everything.
25% on everything you buy.
I know a lot of people have compared me to Howard Beale, you know, the guy
from Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going
to take it!”
But , if you’re watching this
program, you might think the guy who played “Coach” on
ABC — Craig
T. Nelson — is better suited for that
role.
Here Beck plays an excerpt from that interview, then continues, (emphasis
mine):
I want to be clear on one thing: I am not advocating that people should not
pay their income tax. This is a spooky, spooky area. But I think he connected
with an awful lot of people .
But one Craig T. Nelson or Wesley Snipes
is not going to send a message. You know they’re just two out of 100,000 tax
evaders in prisons today, halfway homes, or under house arrest. But
what if, for arguments sake, a million Americans intentionally did not pay
their taxes?
Right now the
IRS is
already able to go through over a 150 million tax returns and punish those,
believe me, harshly who fail to pay, you know, their income tax. They fined
them, between 5–25%. They’ll collect about thirty billion dollars in back
taxes.
And going forward, the Obama administration is preparing. They are devoting
an additional 400 million dollars of your money to get more money from you.
And 800 people are being added to the rolls of the
IRS to
catch tax cheats.
Still, most actual tax evaders don’t wind up in jail. They… well I think they
usually end up its nominees for Obama’s cabinet, but maybe that’s a different
show. Let’s just say a million people don’t pay — not because they’re
cheats, but because they believe the principles that we were founded on have
been violated and they think this is wrong and they try to do something that
they think is the only thing they can.
Put aside the fact that America’s 2.3 million federal state and local prisons
are already overcrowded — they are packed. 36% beyond their rated capacity,
overcrowded to the maximum. If you want to send these million people to
minimum security, 192-bed prison, you can house them for a meager thirty
billion dollars every year. Or if you want to grab those tax cheats, since
they’re probably most likely all just hacks for the
GOP — right wing
Tea Party goers, extremists you know — get better put ’em in a
maximum security prison. That’s a 500-bed prison. That’ll cost you
$100 billion every year.
All in all, it’s probably not worth the government’s time to toss you in
jail, but they gotta do something. Otherwise… otherwise they’re in trouble
and we’re gonna be locked in shackles.
You know. I’ve I think there’s probably a better role model for “Coach” then
Howard Beale: might be Gandhi. Gandhi said, “withholding payment of
taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.” And it
makes common sense: Starving them out of trillions of your hard-earned
dollars would literally put them out of business.
But do Americans want to do that? Do Americans who want to do that
have the guts to follow Gandhi’s example? In order to save children,
our grandchildren, our great great great great great great grandchildren,
from all of this insane debt?
Everything’s gone topsy-turvy. That’s Glenn Beck, right-wing Fox News host,
namechecking Gandhi on the way to promoting mass tax resistance as a way of
overthrowing the
U.S. government.
Completing the inversion, if you read
the Daily Kos audience reaction you’ll see
arguments as pointless and unhinged as anything the WingNutDaily crowd came up
with back in the Dubya years whenever they caught a liberal acting
insufficiently patriotic.
Beck’s pretty-transparently just trying to drum up controversy to boost his
profile. I see no reason to expect that he has any plans to go
mano a mano with the
IRS. For
him, it’s the old coward’s game of “why don’t you and him fight?” He doesn’t
really even have the guts to forthrightly advocate that other people engage in
tax resistance — doing everything but that, but only after covering his ass by
explicitly denying that’s what he’s doing.
But it’s nice to see the idea of tax resistance as a technique of nonviolent
resistance being introduced to a new audience.
…You’re thinking, is it true about not paying income taxes?
NELSON:
Well, what I’m thinking is that, if I’m a fiscally-responsible person
and investor, I’m going to invest my money in a company that’s bankrupt?
I’m going to go to a bank that is not — doesn’t have any fiscal acuity?
And that’s our government.
HANNITY:
That is — it’s worse than that.
NELSON:
And I’m saying to myself, “Wait a minute.
What if each of us withheld as
much as Timothy Geithner withheld?”
As Americans, and said, “You know what?
We’re not going to pay that.”
HANNITY:
You do that, I do that, we’re going to be arrested.
Listen, I mean it
sincerely, Timothy Geithner…
NELSON:
Do you think that a lot of us, en masse, doing the
same thing, standing up — we’re not a representative form of government any more.
We’re not being represented.
We have lobbyists who are petitioning for certain favors, certain grants.
And here we are…
HANNITY:
So you’re saying we hold back what tax cheat Geithner didn’t pay?
Hold
back that amount of money?
NELSON:
Just that amount, would change a lot of things.
HANNITY:
I like that.
NELSON:
At least would, would say…
HANNITY:
I like that idea. Now the IRS is going to arrest me with you. Great.
NELSON:
It would say to the government, you know, we’re protesting the way
you’re doing things.
I didn’t know I was responsible for this bailout.
I really didn’t know.
I wasn’t asked about it.
There were companies that went under.
Aren’t we a capitalistic system?
Aren’t we free to do that?
