How you can resist funding the government →
getting under the income tax line →
it’s not very difficult →
the war tax resistance movement sometimes exaggerates the difficulty
There’s an interesting entry over at the Living on Less blog .
It discusses how exaggerated the perception of wealth is in the United States and how it is that even relatively well-off people have the impression that they’re falling behind as they scramble to try to live an artificially expensive lifestyle they feel they should be able to afford.
In other words, less than I earned, tax-free, this year.
The author goes on to talk about why so many people think “that owning a new car, a house in the suburbs [which can easily cost half a million dollars!], and expensive gadgetry like big screen TVs, palm pilots, cell phones, etc. is the affordable norm for the average person.”
Not surprisingly, advertising and “lifestyle” reporting is blamed (One note: “Not long ago, the Today show presented the following: the results of a survey by a travel magazine on its readers’ favorite vacations [favorite destination: Sydney, Australia; favorite hotel: some Beverly Hills hotel whose rooms cost $350 a night], and a feature on new leisure boats available for sale [least expensive boat: a catamaran for $5000; most expensive boat: a yacht for $300,000].
The New York Times travel section stated recently that vacationing on a yacht is no longer just for the rich: a one-week vacation is available on a rented yacht for a mere $4800!”).
This mass hallucination even reaches, sadly, to the war tax resistance movement — which often makes tax resistance through income lowering sound like a frightening plunge into the depths of deprivation.
Take, for instance, the edition of the War Resisters League book War Tax Resistance, which has this caveat about that form of tax resistance:
For most people in this country, this is not a realistic option, and it leaves them little room to incorporate war tax resistance into their lives.
Promotion of this method may discourage people who might otherwise be sympathetic to war tax resistance.
As I’ve noted often in the last couple of weeks, about 25% of the people who file income tax returns in the United States are already living below the tax line.
So it’s absurd to say that a lifestyle that is already being practiced by a quarter of us is “not a realistic option” for “most people in this country.”
But even people in the war tax resistance movement, who should know better, have an unrealistic view both of how much you can earn and still stay below the tax line, and of how far such an income puts you from relative or absolute poverty.
Here’s another example of how much things have changed for the tax resister, and how the tax resistance movement hasn’t caught up yet (from the New York City War Tax Resistance newsletter):
Last year, I made about $25,000, and I’m still living under the tax line.
I could have brought in a little more.
This year I’m going to try to get myself one of those newfangled high-deductible health insurance plans that qualify for tax-free health savings accounts.
That’ll allow me to bring in another couple of thousand dollars, tax-free.
I’m no brave pioneer living off the land or squatting in an abandoned building — I rent a room in a flat and do my hunting and gathering at neighborhood markets.
arrives this week and Larry Dansinger of the Maine War Tax Resistance Resource Center in Monroe wants you to forget all about it.… April 15 for Dansinger is the glorious date he gets to tell the IRS to stuff it.
In fact, he’s told the IRS to stuff it .
And on , Dansinger and about a dozen like-minded Mainers will pass out pamphlets around the state encouraging you too to stick it to the IRS.
Dansinger recognizes that tax day may be a little late to convince people not to pay their taxes, but he figures this is the perfect time to help new resistors get a jump on next year.
“We want people to start thinking now about the income they are making this year, which they can make changes in if they feel they can no longer pay for the kind of military things that are going on right now,” says Dansinger, who has purposefully hovered at or below the minimum income for federal taxes ($7950 annually for a single person [sic]) for years.…
“Which is more painful,” asks Dansinger, “to risk possibly dealing with the IRS or risk the anguish of having your money used for things you don’t believe in?”
, I ran a war tax resistance information booth at the “Living More With Less” voluntary simplicity conference in Oakland.
It was a good conference — articulate and entertaining speakers and an overall lack of the sort of granola-talk that often turns Bay Area events like these into real eye-rollers.
Many people showed interest in tax resistance and came up to ask questions or to browse our literature.
One of our pamphlets, “Low Income / Simple Living as War Tax Resistance” from NWTRCC, was especially popular.
Alas, it’s also dated.
It doesn’t mention things like Health Savings Accounts, or even IRAs, and tends on the whole to make this form of tax resistance seem excessively renunciatory and difficult.
Speaking of which, here’s a bit from the opening paragraph of a new article about activist Kathy Kelly from the Boise Weekly:
$3,000!
If that were really what it took to do tax resistance this way, I’d find some other method.
Articles like these can do as much harm as good by on the one hand giving an inspiring example of tax resistance and on the other hand making it seem like some frightening martyrdom and daunting sacrifice.
The war tax resistance movement is guilty of contributing to this impression.
Its literature universally makes this path seem more difficult than it is, and its representatives frequently repeat the misinformation about how you have to live below the poverty line to live below the tax line.
For example, here’s Ruth Benn of NWTRCC, writing in the latest The Nonviolent Activist:
