“I intentionally lived on the edge of poverty to avoid paying for the war machine,” said Ruth Clark, a slightly hunched-over elderly woman wearing a pin on her pink lapel that read, “Ask me about Resisting War Taxes.”
A former missionary with the United Methodist Church, Clark was among 60 attendees at the National War Tax Resisters Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) strategy conference.
The conference, held in Brooklyn’s St. Vincent Ferrer Church, sought to provide information and support to war tax resisters and to develop strategies on how to help war tax resistance gain political momentum and garner more supporters within the antiwar movement.…
Clark stopped filing tax returns in , but lived mostly below the taxable income level for years.
Any extra income she did make, she put into a non-taxable Individual Retirement Account (IRA).
When she recently liquidated her IRA and invested it in a project that makes small loans to third world women, her tax burden was raised significantly.
“I had the check in my hands for less than 24 hours, but it made my income for that year higher than it had ever been,” she said.
She filed a return for that year and withheld 47 cents of every dollar she owed — a penny, she said, for every percentage point devoted to military spending.
It was then that the IRS began sending her threatening letters.
Eventually, the government put a lien on her savings and checking accounts and drained the balances.
The IRS is now threatening to take part of her Social Security.
Well into retirement age, Clark’s only income comes from Social Security and her pension from the United Methodist Church.
Although Clark initially considered her war tax resistance a moral act, and not a political one, her recent experiences motivated her to share her resistance.
She hopes that “by my sharing, someone else is strengthened to say I’ll do it.
I won’t pay for war.”
The latest war tax resistance profile to hit the press features Ruth Clark.
It highlights the need for tax resisters like myself to take the long view — if I put money into retirement accounts today to avoid the federal income tax, I need to be aware that I will need to have a strategy for avoiding the tax on what I take out of those accounts later on, otherwise I’m not “resisting” so much as deferring my taxes.
To help finance a future George W. Bush has painted as permanently at war, the IRS has raided Ruth Clark’s bank accounts, taking all her money.
Every month, the IRS has continued to seize 15% of Clark’s Social Security income, leaving this retired Methodist missionary without adequate means to meet her living expenses.
“I intentionally live on the edge of poverty to avoid paying for the war machine,” Clark said.
“Would it be right for me to murder?
Would it be OK for me to make children orphans?
Do you think it would be OK for me to support a war where children are maimed, where they lose their arms, their legs, their eyes?
How can I pay for that?”
“During the years that I earned more money than I needed, I found out that I could put up to $2,000 a year into an IRA to reduce my taxable income,” Clark said.
“I kept on amassing a bankroll because if I spent any of the money I would have to pay income tax, and that would violate my conscience.”
During her many years as a missionary and later as a volunteer on stipend with the United Farm Workers, Clark was not required to file a Federal Income Tax form.
But in , after cashing the IRA, she filed the required form — under protest.
“I withheld 47% of the taxes the IRS determined I owed,” Clark said.
“This is the percentage of the federal budget that is used to finance wars.”
“The IRS came after me for the deferred taxes they said I owed them,” Clark said.
They “put a lien on my Credit Union account in California in .
They emptied it out.”
“I wrote and told them [the IRS] of my conscientious objection to war,” Clark said, “but they came back again and took the money from my bank in Asheville.
My checks started to bounce and the bank, Blue Ridge Savings, charged me for each one.
My Social Security and my pension from the Mission Fund had been electronically deposited.
So the IRS took it all.
I don’t think they are singling me out.
There are a lot of people they are after in the same way they are after me.”
Clark no longer has enough to meet her monthly rent, which “went up to top dollar,” she said.
“Now, with all this trouble, I’m in arrears.
I have my pension check going directly to the Brooks-Howell Home now to help pay my rent, but the IRS still deducts 15% of my Social Security check.”
But Clark is quick to add, “Compared to what that money from the U.S. is doing to other countries, my plight is not so difficult.
The more I read, the more radical I become.”
“My hope is not that people will make a contribution to the shortness of my cash, but that they will figure out a way that they also will stop paying for war, and that they will help somebody else to stop paying for war.
Then we will multiply our strength, not just by the amount of money that we refuse to give [to the IRS], but in the numbers of us who will say, ‘I will not pay for war.’ ”
