Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
Vietnam War, ~1965–75 →
Cornell University staff, 1970 →
Daniel Berrigan
During the Vietnam War, resistance to the federal excise tax on telephone service was very popular in the anti-war movement, including the campus peace movement.
Here are some newspaper articles from that period.
Ithacans who have been refusing to pay their federal telephone tax in protesting the Vietnam war have so far escaped tax free.
“A lot of people are doing this across the country,” said Natalie P. Kent,
who suggested withholding the tax at a meeting of the recently formed
Tompkins County Peace Association.
The federal tax, which is listed on the itemized bill, was originally three per cent and scheduled to be abolished.
In it was raised to 10 per cent, specifically to help finance the war in Vietnam.
Protesters deduct either seven or ten percent taxes from their payments and
enclose a letter to the telephone company explaining why they are not paying
the full bill.
The telephone company acts only as a billing agency in collecting the federal tax.
When an incomplete payment accompanied by an explanatory letter is received, the company reports it to the Internal Revenue Service, said D.J. Martin, manager of the New York Telephone Company.
Since the bills are confidential, no estimate of how many people are refusing
to pay is available. The protest action is not coordinated by any
organization.
Prof. Carol L. Marks, English, said that the tax withholding, like any protest, is “more for the private satisfaction of the people involved,” because the significance lies in the mind of the person who’s doing it.” [sic]
She subtracts the tax from her bill every month out of habit, and does not
expect the government to take action to collect the taxes because “its not
worth it.”
Information on such tax refusal is sent to regional Internal Revenue Service offices in Buffalo.
“Sooner or later they (the protesters) will be contacted to collect the
tax,” said an Internal Revenue spokesman.
Washington (UPI) — Americans looking for a cheap and safe way to protest the war in Vietnam are refusing to pay the federal excise tax on their telephone bills, the Internal Revenue service said today.
But the IRS usually collects the money after all.
Last week it issued new rules aimed at speeding up the collection process by cutting out time consuming hearings on war protest cases.
So far, nobody has gone to jail over the telephone tax protests, and IRS officials doubt if they ever will because, as one spokesman explained:
“These people generally only do it once or twice and then start paying again, so the money held back is never great enough to warrant criminal action.”
The bargain-basement method of dissent has been operating around the nation for the past 15 months, according to the IRS.
But the number of citizens involved is less than 4,000 once-a-month protesters.
The approach is made to order for the timid soul who wants to clear his
conscience over a burning issue but doesn’t want any risk involved.
It’s cheap: The 10 per cent tax on a monthly phone bill is rarely more than a dollar or two, so there aren’t any fines or costly bail bonds to pay.
It’s safe: No getting trampled in crowds.
And best of all, the telephone service continues without interruption as long as the rest of the bill is paid.
The IRS explained that the phone tax is levied against the customer but is collected by the company.
So, as long as the service charge is paid, the phone stays connected.
All the company does is notify the IRS when a customer pays all but the tax on a bill.
Persons who refuse to pay the federal excise tax on telephone service during the Moratorium demonstrations could have the tax deducted from their earnings or bank account, according to the Utica office of the Internal Revenue Service.
In addition: they could be fined up to $10,000 or imprisoned for up to five years or both.
The Utica Moratorium Committee plans to hand out leaflets in front of the New York Telephone Company’s office building at 270 Genesee Street.
The leaflets will urge telephone customers not to pay the federal excise tax which is included in their telephone bills, the Moratorium Committee claims that the excise tax is used to further “the war machine” and says persons refusing to pay cannot be prosecuted.
A spokesman for the IRS yesterday quoted Section 6331 of the IRS Code, entitled Levy and Distraint.
“If any person liable to pay any tax neglects or refuses to pay the same within 10 days after notice and demand, it shall be lawful for the Secretary of the Treasury or his delegate to collect such tax and such further sum as should be sufficient to cover the expenses of the levy by a levy upon all property (except such property as is exempt under Section 6334) belonging to such person.”
Punishment for non-payment is covered in Section 7201 of the same code:
“Any person who willfully attempts, in any manner to evade this title or payment shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of a felony and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
The Moratorium Committee decided at its meeting to picket the Internal Revenue Service in addition to passing out leaflets in front of the Telephone Company.
The Cornell Vietnam Mobilization Committee has stated that it “endorses tax resistance as a protest to the continuing war in Vietnam and urges people to refuse to pay the federal telephone excise tax which was levied expressly and retained to help finance the Vietnam War.”
According to the committee’s statement, “The Vietnam Moratorium Committee, The New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Clergy and Laymen Concerned,” and several other groups “are working together with the War Tax Resistance to build the largest tax movement possible.”
The War Tax Resisters will hold workshops on tax resistance during the America is Hard to Find Weekend at 10, 11 and noon Saturday and at 11 a.m.
Sunday in the Willard Straight Kimball Room, said the statement.
Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. and 45 other members of the Cornell University staff and their wives have “declared their intention to refuse payment of the federal excise tax on their telephone bills as a gesture of protest against our government’s policy in Vietnam.”
“To refuse to pay the federal excise tax one merely deducts the amount from the telephone bill and sends a note with his bill explaining the action,” according to the Cornell Mobilization statement.
The telephone company has made assurances that phone service will not be interrupted, the statement said.
The Internal Revenue Service sends a bill after three months to a person refusing to pay the tax.
After one more contact, “the IRS attempts to seek out a bank account or salary check from which they can deduct the unpaid amount plus 6 per cent interest, said the committee.
One who “willfully fails to pay” the phone tax could be charged with a misdemeanor under the Internal Revenue Code.
A group of about 70 young and old people joined in a quiet lunch-hour march to New England Telephone and Telegraph’s Boston offices to protest the use of phone taxes to support the war.
At the phone company, they paid their
phone bills-minus the tax. The tax money, which totaled $112, was presented
to Marces Muncis, a New England representative of the United Farm Workers.
The Farm Workers will use the money to help support a clinic in Delanos,
California.
The money was collected in a helmet which symbolized the 101 Americans who died in Southeast Asia during the past week.
The marchers obtained this figure-which represents the highest toll in five-and-a-half months-from the Record American on the way to New England Tel and Tel.
The Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund and the Boston Tax Resistance organized
the “tax march.” The Roxbury group, which is about three years old, now has
about $25,500 in unpaid income and phone taxes in its accounts. The principle
is held in escrow, but the interest is donated regularly to community
projects. In , the Roxbury fund gave
$354 to the Storefront Learning Center in Boston.
Boston Tax Resistance, a newer group, has collected about $2500 in unpaid phone taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service now collects about one-and-a-half billion
dollars annually through the phone tax, which was instituted to provide funds
for the war.
“It seems like a small thing when it’s tacked on your phone bill, but this [the $142] shows that it really adds up,” a woman from Boston Tax Resistance said at the phone company rally .
A group of peace activists is calling on Harvard students and Faculty to risk imprisonment and fines by not paying the Federal excise tax on long distance telephone calls in protest against the Indochina war.
Calling itself TaxPax, the group is circulating a petition which urges
members of the Harvard community to refuse to pay the tax, which the group
calls “born in war, and regressive in effect.”
The Harvard Indochina Teach-in Committee is also endorsing the tax strike, and two Faculty members — Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science, and Herbert C. Kelman, Richard Clarke Cabot professor of Social Ethics — will be circulating similar petitions among the Faculty.
“This tax on phone calls raises money directly for the war,” James Henry
, one of the organizers of TaxPax, said
. “It was raised from three to ten
per cent in at the peak of the escalation
of the war, and even Mills [Congressman Wilbur B. Mills (D-Ark.), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee]
has said that the money is for the war.”
TaxPax organizers estimate the tax raises $1.4 billion annually.
According to Henry, people who refuse to pay this tax are liable to a one
year jail sentence as well as a $10,000 fine. In addition, they could be
charged with attempting “to evade or defeat” the phone tax, which carries a
penalty of five years imprisonment.
“So far,” Henry said, “the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hasn’t prosecuted anyone over the phone tax.
What they’ve been doing is levying a lien on the person’s bank account to get the money.
They don’t want to put people in jail, they just want the money.”
Henry estimates that following up on tax evaders costs the
IRS
$400 per case, in addition to adding a lot of paperwork and confusion to the
system.
A spokesman for the IRS seemed less than concerned about the proposed tax resistance.
“We respond the same way to people who evade the phone tax as to all other
tax delinquents,” Edward Callanan, Public Information Officer of the Boston
IRS
said . “We send a bill to the
person who hasn’t paid the tax, and if we don’t hear from him in another
month we send another bill. If he still doesn’t pay, then we’ll take the
money from his bank account or any other personal assets.”
TaxPax is following the example of the Boston War Tax Resistance League, a group which has been active for over a year collecting money that would have gone to phone taxes.
The group has raised over $25,000 which has gone to community action projects.
About 1150 Harvard and Radcliffe students have signed an agreement to withhold payment of the tax on their phone bills as a protest against the Indochina war.
TaxPax, an organization of Harvard students and faculty members, started
circulating a petition to withhold the phone tax
. The petition included the
stipulation that the names of the signers would not be made public until 1000
people had signed it. That number was reached on
.
Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science, and Herbert C. Kelman, Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, plan to solicit similar commitments from faculty members.
Mendelsohn is now drafting a letter which he will send to some 800 members of
the Faculty urging them to withhold their phone tax.
TaxPax and similar organizations, including the Boston War Tax Resistance League, oppose the tax on long distance phone calls because its revenues finance the Vietnam war.
“The tax on phone calls makes money directly for the war,” said James S.
Henry , one of the TaxPax organizers. TaxPax
organizers estimate that the phone tax raises some $1.4 billion annually.
Although refusal to pay the tax can result in imprisonment and fines, the Internal Revenue Service normally gets the money by attaching the delinquent taxpayer’s bank account.
Henry said that this method of tax collection is being challenged in the courts.
TaxPax will also encourage the resisters to contribute the tax money to
antiwar or community groups such as day care centers. And TaxPax founders may
try to get people who signed the agreement to participate in non-violent
activity in Washington, D.C. this spring.
War Tax Resistance (WTR) is calling for a boycott of the ten per cent federal telephone excise tax as a means of protesting the war in Viet Nam.
“It is clear,” said
Rep. Wilbur Mills,
chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “that Vietnam and only the
Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”
War Tax Resistance sees the refusal to pay this “war tax” as means of showing the government that people are willing to break the law in their opposition to the war.
It also creates “a thorny collection problem for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” according to WTR.
Life Funds
According to Robert Calvert of the New York headquarters “People’s Life
Funds” are being created around the country for people to send the money they
would normally pay in telephone excise taxes to.
Refusal to pay the telephone tax is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for up to one year and a fine of up to $10,000.
According to Calvert, nobody has yet been arrested for open tax resistance.
“The government is not willing to publicize it because it may spread.”
Service stop?
The telephone companies as a rule do not interrupt the service of a tax resister if the rest of the phone bill is paid.
They merely contact the IRS and leave it up to them to collect the tax.
The IRS
then contacts the resister by mail with a demand for the unpaid amount and may
pay him a visit. The
IRS
will finally seek out a bank account of or payroll check from which to deduct
the amount, plus up to six per cent interest.
In order to publicly demonstrate resistance to the Federal telephone tax that was instituted to fund the Vietnam war, the Cornell Mobe is sponsoring a demonstration at the Ithaca office of the Telephone Company and at Southside House, a local community center.
People who refuse to pay “the war tax” are urged to assemble at
at the telephone
company office, at 208 E.
Buffalo St. The plan then
calls for a march from the telephone office to Southside House, at 305
S. Plane
St., where demonstrators will
be asked to donate the money they withheld from their phone bills.
According to Douglas Kenyon, the money will be donated to Southside’s Early Childhood Development program, as a demonstration that “people want their money to be used for the development of children here, not the destruction of children in Vietnam.”
“This act compels the participants to examine their own depth of commitment
to help to end this war.”
According to war resistance organizations in New York City, people who refuse to pay the tax could possibly be charged with a misdemeanor, under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code.
They could be imprisoned up to a year and fined up to $10,000.
However, experiences of people who have refused to pay the tax indicate that
the government does not press criminal charges in these cases.
For example, Carl Kukkonen, a Mobe member who has not paid the tax in over a year, stated that the IRS has not threatened him with criminal charges, nor has his telephone service been cut off.
Kukkonen said that he received letters from the IRS, which threatened to “seize property” if he did not pay the $4.32 plus a 13 cents interest charge they claimed he owned them.
About a year after he stopped paying the tax, the IRS deducted that amount from his bank account.
“This is one way to make our point to the government in the most basic terms, and that means money,” said Prof. James Matlack, English, after a War Tax Resistance demonstration at the Ithaca telephone company office .
After meeting at the telephone company office on Buffalo Street, 13 tax
resisters marched to Southside Community Center where they donated $62 that
they withheld from their telephone bills.
The contribution represented the 10 per cent phone tax that was levied to help finance the Vietnam war.
The sum withheld was donated to the Southside Day Care and Child Development
program, in order to demonstrate the belief that tax revenues needed for
health and education programs are instead being spent on war.
“We insist that funds be spent for growth, nurture and healing, not for maiming and destruction — spent for life instead of death,” wrote Matlack in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service.
According to Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, people who refuse to
pay the tax could possibly be imprisoned up to one year and fined up to
$10,000. The telephone company is not responsible for enforcing tax payment
and will not discontinue service.
Tax resistance demonstrations similar to ’s protest are scheduled to be held once a month.
A group of Ithaca residents plans to gather in front of the New York Telephone Company to protest the war in Indochina.
The members of the Telephone War Refusal Group are opposed to the use of the
10 per cent Federal excise tax, which they content is used to support the
war. They plan to give the tax money instead to Ithaca’s Southside Community
Center.
At the Telephone Company offices, the group members plan to pay their telephone bill minus the excise tax.
They will then walk over to the Community Center to donate the tax money.
The group issued a statement to the Internal Revenue Service to explain its
actions.
It said, “To show our opposition to the U.S. involvement in Indochina, we are refusing to pay the Federal excise tax levied on our telephone bills to supply revenues to continue the war… Instead of supporting death, we choose to support life and growth.”
Protesters of the Vietnam War who are refusing to pay their telephone excise tax are sadly misinformed about their efforts, Jerry West, Internal Revenue collector says.
If they wanted to stop paying taxes on the war they would have to stop eating, buying sugar, and driving a car.
And those who have refused to pay are sorry because of the complications involved when the Internal Revenue Service receives the case for collection.
Not so say coordinators of the Columbia War Tax Resistance. Refusing to pay
the telephone tax is an easy and viable protest method because the telephone
excise tax was specifically increased from 3 to 10 per percent to pay for the
strain caused by the Vietnam War. The Internal Revenue Service may attach a
bank account or salary check for the unpaid amount plus 6 per cent interest
but the time and money involved in the collection far outweighs the money
that would be involved in non-payment of the tax.
David Bray, one of the local organizers, suggests that all money ordinarily paid to the excise tax be channeled to an “alternative fund,” a program that uses tax money to finance grants to community groups sponsoring such programs as day-care centers, drug abuse programs, or doctors working with Vietnamese children injured by the war.
The movement is not purely local: it has groups in 179 centers and
alternative fund programs in 23 cities. The importance of the program, Bray
says, is its symbolic value. Tax funds are being used to directly benefit the
people. He cites the historic tradition of American protest against taxes in
the Revolutionary War, specifically the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act
Rebellion.
Telephone company officials act only as collectors for the government, alerting them if a subscriber has refused to pay his excise tax.
They cannot discontinue service as long as a customer’s service bill is paid.
A case sent to a federal court in Mississippi was settled in favor of the defendant and service was restored.
Richard Randall, Columbia office manager for the General Telephone
Co., says the local office
forwards all refusals to pay tax to its home office in Grinnell, Iowa. From
there these letters are sent to the Internal Revenue Service and followup
begins.
Bray says the general policy of the telephone company has been to send out a letter saying that you have refused to pay your tax and do you want to reconsider — a type of second chance letter.
After this, the refusals are forwarded.
West and Larry Schreiber of the Internal Revenue Service say that the money
going for the war from excise tax wont won’t even begin to pay for the
expenses involved. They point out that only 8 cents of every tax dollar
represents excise tax and of that amount 37 per cent goes for the war while
63 per cent is channeled into health, education, and welfare. West says
“Every time someone tells me he is refusing to pay his excise tax in protest
of the war, I tell him he is taking food away from a hungry child.”
The 720 Quarterly Federal Excise Tax Return lists the following services as covered by excise tax: Toll telephone service, teletypewriter exchange service, local telephone service, transportation of persons and property by air, use of international air travel facilities, policies issued by foreign insurers, the manufacture of pistols and revolvers, truck, bus, and trailer chassis and bodies, tractors, auto chassis and bodies, parts or accessories for trucks, fishing rods and artificial lures, firearms, shells, and cartridges, sugar, diesel fuel and special motor fuels, gasoline, lubricating oil, tires, inner tubes, tread rubber, and fuel used in non-commercial aviation.
All this money goes into one pot and it is impossible to determine what money
is channeled for which program, West says.
In some cases, Bray says, IRS officers have tried to auction off a subscriber’s car to get the non-paid telephone excise tax money but the publicity has caused more harm than good.
Friends buy the car and then get their money back after the IRS has subtracted the amount of the unpaid bill.
Money collected by alternate programs in Boston and Philadelphia is in the
$25,000 and $50,000 range. Payments are being made off the interest collected
on the money. All money is channeled into a local bank and donors receive a
receipt for their contributions. All participants have a say in deciding to
whom the money is granted.
Locally, organizers hope to be able to make a sizable contribution to a group by , the deadline for filing ’s income tax returns.
They have established offices in the Help Yourself Center, 915 East Broadway.
And, as proof of their beliefs, they quote
Rep. Wilbur Mills,
chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “that Vietnam and only the
Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.” (Congressional Record
.)
Let’s cast ourselves back, shall we, to , by which time the American anti-war movement had really hit its stride, and war tax resistance was prominently on the agenda.
As approaches, most taxpayers are studiously calculating how much to turn over to the Internal Revenue Service.
A small but growing group of citizens, however, is just as studiously determining how much they will refuse to pay the tax collector.
In the latest, and perhaps the ultimate, form of antiwar protest, hundreds and possibly thousands of taxpayers are preparing to hold back, or have already held back, anything from a symbolic few dollars to the 10 per cent war-born Federal surtax on their whole income tax for the year.
At the very least, these irate citizens hope their actions will register as formal protests against the Vietnam war.
The more optimistic among them envision the war-effort’s being actually affected, should enough people hold back on their taxes.
It all began , with an organization of New Left and pacifist opponents of the war called War Tax Resistance.
WTR’s headquarters is a littered office on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The group also claims 62 resistance centers around the country, a number that has more than doubled .
And it plans nationwide demonstrations at IRS offices on .
The group’s “coordinator” is Bradford Lyttle, a seasoned pacifist who led a peace march through the U.S. and Europe to Moscow a decade ago.
WTR dispenses the usual paraphernalia of protest buttons, newsletters, and posters.
One poster shows a sprawl of dead children under the pronouncement “Your Tax Dollars at Work.”
But mostly the propaganda treads a careful line between evangelic encouragement to defy the tax-coliector and occasional cautions that doing so could land the tax resister in a heap of trouble, perhaps jail.
The tax resisters also point to respectable historical precedents.
Quakers and Mennonites refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.
And Henry David Thoreau is spiritually summoned forth from his night in jail in for refusing to pay taxes in protest against the U.S. invasion of Mexico.
“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills,” Thoreau said, “that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
But tax resistance leaders warn that Thoreau’s imitators cannot be sure of getting off as lightly as he did.
“As we develop a broad movement of tax resistance,” cautions a Chicago-based WTR group, “we must anticipate a certain number of criminal prosecutions, and many merciless attempts to collect from tax resisters.
Here is a good rule of thumb for all would-be resisters: if you can’t stand heat, don’t put your hand in the fire.”
Such warnings generally are played down in tax-resistance circles.
Instead, there is a tendency to emphasize that the IRS so far has shied away from criminal action in favor of attaching salaries or seizing bank accounts.
There are, of course, other frustrations.
WTR guidance on how to go about not paying taxes inevitably confronts the fact that a good many people already have — through payroll withholding taxes, and that getting tax money back is obviously a more difficult matter than not paying up to begin with.
One tax resistor from Minneapolis claims to have at least temporarily beaten the withholding system.
He listed 40 million Vietnamese as dependents on his 1040 form; and the IRS, he says, has already sent him a refund.
He hopes this was one more example of the fallibility of computers, but tax resisters expect the human arithmeticians at IRS to be after the refundee soon enough.
All the same, stretching the definition of dependents is one of the main tactics tax resisters are proposing.
“We must explicitly reject the standards defined by a blind bureaucracy and affirm instead definitions that spring from our own consciousness of human solidarity,” goes a bit of neo-Orwellianism from the Chicago WTR center.
The resisters are also zeroing in on other Federal taxes, most notably the 10 per cent Federal excise on telephone charges.
According to telephone officials, many tax resisters have already begun subtracting the 10 per cent before paying their bills.
The telephone tax resisters evidently feel somewhat encouraged by telephone company policy: to accept the truncated payments, to continue service, and to leave the collection of the 10 per cent tax up to the IRS.
Income tax resisters have been a smaller band in recent years than telephone tax non-payers.
But their numbers have been growing of late at a far greater rate.
In , when the IRS first began to keep tabs on tax protesters, some 375 were counted.
In , there were 533, and , 848.
Resistance leaders feel that even if the amounts of nonpayment are small, symbolic sums, they could have significant impact by snarling the tax-collecting machinery.
In a hand-lettered flier, titled, “No money, no war,” poet Allen Ginsberg asserts:
“If money talks, several hundred thousand citizens, refusing payments to our war government will short-circuit the nerve system of our electronic bureaucracy.”
The IRS has already formed a group of agents to go after conscientious non-payers, but an IRS spokesman stolidly denies that the electronics of the tax-collecting machinery can be jammed or ultimately evaded by the resisters.
With the folk wisdom of civilization on his side, he says: “You can’t avoid your tax bill.”
To which WTR coordinator Lyttle, portentiously replies: “We’ll find out.”
The government is a business proposition supported by a faith in its institutions which brings value to the dollar and the collection of dollars through taxes, which supports the government institutions.
Like any other business, the government is not pleased when its customers, the American people, do not pay their bills on time, and upset with some fail to pay at all.
However, there are those who believe the product for which they are paying is not up to company standards.
That product is the Vietnam war.
And so, these same people believe, if they don’t like the product, why should they pay for it?
Protest rekindled
On the war tax resistance moves en masse.
All across the country protests are scheduled and various resistance groups are urging taxpayers to withhold part of all of their taxes in protest of the Vietnam war.
The war tax resistance groups do not oppose all taxes, just those going toward the war.
Various methods of resistance could be applied toward this purpose.
The method presently stressed by the resistance movement is refusing to pay at least $5 of some tax owed the government.
Or one might just refuse to pay part of his taxes, such as the additional income, the ten per cent surtax, or the telephone tax.
One might refuse to pay the percentage of his tax going toward the war.
He could base his refusal on the percentage of the total national budget used for war, on the cost of the Vietnam war, or on other calculations.
Some people pay part of their tax and contribute the rest as a “peace tax” to the United Nations or some relief agency.
Generally, these people contribute to organizations engaged in peaceful, constructive work.
But even though the government is not a profit making organization, it does not like to accumulate unpaid bills.
Don Werner, acting group supervisor of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) explained a six per cent interest and six per cent penalty charge accompany that part of the taxes due to the government and withheld by the taxpayer.
Werner said IRS offers “every opportunity to pay” the tax and the first step toward collection takes the form of letters to the delinquent tax payer.
A bill is sent out and if it is not paid within ten days, the task of collection is turned over to a collecting officer.
Extreme measure
The most extreme measure the internal revenue office can take is to levy on all property belonging to the individual.
However, certain property items are exempt from this levy, such as tools and books necessary for the person’s trade, business, or profession.
A complete list can be found in the internal revenue code.
Beyond all this, IRS can recommend the U.S. Attorney’s office take legal action against the delinquent taxpayer.
Richard Makarski, chief of the tax division for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said the maximum penalty for tax evasion is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Before any penalty is handed out, he said, the case is reviewed by the tax division of the justice department and if felony is involved a grand jury indictment is issued.
Makarski said that cases of this type were rare and “I don’t see the government taking much action against war protesters.”
He said only major cases of evasion were prosecuted.
So the war tax resistance movement is not likely to cause much damage to the war process, but in the words of one member of the Vietnam Moratorium committee, “it will show the government people are willing to do something assertive to protest the war.”
Sylvia Kushner, executive secretary of the Chicago Peace Council said the withholding of the phone tax will cause no damage to the individual and at worst the government will take the tax out of that person’s bank account.
The nationwide protest on has as its theme, Who pays for the war?
Who profits from the war?
And in no small way the peace guys are focusing ’s protest on the answers to those questions.
Five Harvard faculty members and nine M.I.T. professors — including two Nobel prize-winners — have announced their intention to withhold portions of their taxes to protest the Vietnam War.
In identical letters appearing in the Crimson and the M.I.T. Tech this week, the professors said they will refuse to pay portions of the 10 per cent surtax or the telephone tax “as a sign of our personal opposition to the continuing Vietnam War.”
Salvador E. Luria, M.I.T.’s Nobel laureate, and George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology and a Nobel winner, each signed the letters to their colleagues.
Other Harvard signers are Harvey Cox, professor of Divinity; Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science; Herbert C. Kelman, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethies; and Mark Ptashne, lecturer in Biochemistry.
The signers asked other faculty members who have also decided to withhold their taxes to join them in a press release on — the same day that tax resistance rallies are scheduled around the country.
The Boston professors are among the first groups in the country to announce a systematic plan for withholding taxes.
Several individuals — most notably Joan Baez — have withheld taxes to protest the war in the past.
In most cases the government has simply appropriated bank accounts or pay checks to get the revenue, although tax resisters are liable to jail sentences.
“Dragging One’s Feet”
“All of us confidently expect the government will collect the tax before this is through,” Wald said .
“We are expressing our disapproval of what our country is doing and making it more expensive to collect these taxes and do it.
“You understand that one is essentially dragging one’s feet.” he added.
“We are clearly engaging in a conscious form of civil disobedience,” Mendelsohn said.
“We are judging the war.
We are saying it is wrong, and we are consciously cutting ourselves off from the war in the ways that we can.
Cox, who is now on sabbatical from the Divinity School, said the purpose of the action is to involve non-draft-age people in the anti-war movement.
“We’ve been asking young people to take a lot of risks — burning draft cards, resisting the draft, marching.
I think it’s time to spread the risk through the whole life cycle,” he said .
The tax withholding is aimed primarity at the telephone tax and the 10 per cent surtax which were approved as means of financing the rising cost of the war.
Harvard is forced to deduct the surtax on salaries monthly, but taxes on royalties and honorariums must be assessed privately every year by the April 15 tax deadline.
To the Editor:
The undersigned members and wives of the staff at Cornell University declare their intention to refuse payment of the Federal excise tax on their telephone bills as a gesture of protest against our government’s policy in Vietnam.
This tax was specifically retained by Congress as a revenue measure to provide funds for the war.
By our action, we signify our unwillingness to pay for that brutal, immoral war, one which has brought death and destruction to the Vietnamese, their land, and their culture.
We refuse to sanction further waste of lives and treasure in defense of a corrupt and totalitarian regime in Saigon.
The Vietnamese must be given true self-determination.
American troops must be brought home.
The War Must Be Stopped.
Andreas and Genia Albrecht, David and Carol Jasnow, Douglas and Marie Archibald, Jack Kiefer, Michael and Judy Balch, Jack and Mary Lewis, Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., David Marr, David and Eloise Blanpied, Jim and Jean Matlack, Stephen Chase, Chandler and Katrina Morse, John and Sandra Condry, Reeve Parker, Robert Connelly, George and Julie Rinehart, Fred Cooper, Walter and Jane Slatoff, Vincent and Jill De Luca, Michael and Eve Stocker, Douglas Dowd, David Stroud, Daniel and Linda Finlay, Moss and Marilyn Sweedler, Bill and Maggie Goldsmith, Winthrop and Andrea Wetherbee, Neil and Louise Hertz, Tom and Carol Hill.
Opponents of American policy in Vietnam massed in Boston and New York , while similar protest demonstrations — some objecting to the use of tax dollars to support the war — were staged in cities and towns across the country.
Crowds in Boston Common were estimated at 60,000, in New York’s Bryant Park, 20,000, but generally turnouts were below that of previous moratoriums.
Tea was dumped into the Mississippi and Cedar rivers as reenactments of the Revolutionary era’s tax defiance — the Boston Tea Party.
Demonstrators at Internal Revenue Service sites numbered 4,000 in Chicago and in New York City, and ranged down to about 700 in Washington, D.C., 200 in Boston, 150 in White Plains, N.Y., and 16 in Oklahoma City.
Violence flared during demonstrations at the Berkeley campus of the University of California; demonstrators at Pennsylvania State University seized and damaged the administration building, and a brief melee erupted between police and protesters in Detroit.
In Washington, David Dellinger of the Chicago 7 urged a youthful, largely white crowd of 2,000 near the capitol to withhold their taxes as a means of forcing change in the United States.
“I advocate overthrowing the government by force but not by violence,” he told a rally, “and tax refusal is but one of the cutting edges and forces that are available to us.”
Young demonstrators burned two American flags during an earlier rally, drawing murmurs of disapproval from the rest of the crowd.
“We are going to make sure that this is a not so silent spring.” said Sam Brown, national coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, one of several groups sponsoring the Boston rally.
The crowd on the common was about 40,000 short of the 100,000 who gathered there .
In New York City, William Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial, told the Bryant Park gathering:
“The time has come to resist illegitimate authority by any means necessary.”
Freund gives a brief overview of the history of conscientious tax resistance
that seems to me to understate it, though it’s possible that in
less evidence was easily available.
[I]t was not until the Vietnam War that tax resistance became a significant form of Christian witness against war.
One of the early Vietnam-era tax resisters was William Faw, a minister of the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches.
Faw had not come to my attention before, but Freund tells his story as follows:
William Faw: “Here I Stand; I Cannot Do Other”
William Faw was born in in Nigeria where his parents were missionaries for the Brethren Church.
His father took a post teaching at Bethany Seminary, and the family moved to Chicago where Bill grew up.
He went to college in Indiana and then attended the seminary until his graduation in .
While at school Faw was compelled to confront the issue of the draft. “Both my
parents were pacifists so I had decided early on that I would either be a
resister or a conscientious objector; I could not accept a student or
ministerial deferment in good conscience,” explains Faw. Despite his religious
background it still required a two-year battle with the draft board to obtain
his CO
status. By the time he received
CO status
he had a family and was never required to perform alternative service.
He received his first assignment in at the Douglas Park Church of the Brethren, a poor, multiracial community on the West Side of Chicago.
It was during this period that Bill Faw became a tax resister.
Faw explains that decision, saying, “I was a self-employed pastor and my wife was not working so we had control over our tax payments.
Since my wife was also a pacifist, we felt that it was necessary to protest the Vietnam War.
The question was, ‘How can we do this together?’ We spoke with several other Brethren who had been refusing taxes and listened to political leaders who opposed the war.
By early we decided to refuse to pay our taxes in full knowledge that it could lead to criminal punishment.”
When the time came to file their income tax
return, the Faws sent the
IRS a
long letter explaining why there was no check enclosed. Other resisters had
engaged in resistance by refusing even to file a return, but Faw believed that
a religious witness should be made in an open and public manner. The Faws’
letter made clear the personal struggle which accompanied their decision:
We refuse to willingly contribute to a “war machine” which is engaged in the very brutal war in Vietnam… In the past we felt that the ambiguities of tax paying outweighed the war-tax issue.
That is, our government’s expenditures for foreign aid, law enforcement, programs in health, education, and welfare, agriculture, urban redevelopment, and poverty fighting are worthy of support… Events have occurred which lead us to reconsider our responsibilities as citizens.
We feel we can be true to our national citizenship only if we oppose a so-called “non-war” that has not been constitutionally declared.
We feel that we can be true to our international citizenship as spelled out at the Nuremberg Trials only if we disassociate ourselves from and actively protest our unjust, illegal, morally deplorable, aggressive offensive against human beings in Vietnam.
But most basically we feel that we can be true to our Christian discipleship
only if we oppose… the seizure of God’s prerogative by the United States in
attempting to become the philosophical, theological, executive, legislative,
judicial, and policing agency for the entire world; only if we oppose the
exploiting of American “racism” by
A-bombing, napalming,
scatterbombing Asians; only if we oppose the mode of “evangelistic effort”
our nation is making in Vietnam to show the Buddhists what being a
“Christian” nation means…
Thus we are led to withhold our income tax and to seek constructive alternative ways of sharing our income… In God’s name, and under his judgment, we pray that we might choose the best path to make our witness.
…As a result, they chose to donate the tax money to the Canadian Friends Service Committee for the relief of war victims.
They were well aware that some of those victims who would be helped by their money were North Vietnamese and Viet Cong; they believed this action to be consistent with Jesus’ command to “love your enemy.”
The Faws refused to pay their income taxes for the next five years, donating
the funds to various international relief agencies. The Internal Revenue
Service sent an agent to attempt to obtain the taxes directly. When this
failed the
IRS
placed a levy on the Faws’ bank account and was able to collect the back
taxes. The Faws were not threatened with criminal penalties.
Freund says the Faws were also resisting their phone tax, but returned to being taxpayers in the wake of the Paris Peace Accords.
However, as of the writing of the book, they were planning to become resisters again by refusing a percentage of their income tax:
The continuing military buildup, especially nuclear weapons, has led us to resume tax resistance… We are being lulled into accepting more and more.
Johnson tried to give us guns and butter, but Reagan’s policy of sacrificing butter for guns represents a barbaric reversal of priorities.
Freund asked about the practical effectiveness of individual tax resistance.
…Faw conceded that it would be far more powerful if institutions were to openly advocate and practice tax resistance. “If one church did it, even a small one like the Brethren, the Mennonites, or the Quakers, it would have a tremendous impact on some of the liberal mainline denominations,” Faw believes.
However, even the New Call To Peacemaking, a grassroots movement within the historic peace churches begun in , of which Faw was the local chairman for two years, has failed to adopt a position of total resistance to war taxes.
This has been a source of frustration for Bill Faw, but he nevertheless believes in the importance of individual witness, “I would still do it even if no one else did.
There comes a point, with Vietnam or the arms race, where you say, ‘I’m not going to participate in that, no matter what the cost.’ It’s kind of like Martin Luther saying, ‘Here I stand; I cannot do other.’ ”
Freund then briefly described “A Simple Methodology” for Christians who were considering war tax resistance, covering the options of 1) paying taxes under protest, 2) voluntary poverty, 3) refusal to pay.
He then tried to discern what sort of guidance might be found in the Bible, considering the difficult “Render unto Caesar” and “the powers that be are ordained of God” sections in particular.
Then he returns to the problem of the lack of institutional support for war tax
resistance among Christian churches:
War Taxes: Where the Churches Are
Bill Faw and tax attorney William Durland express frustration that the churches, as national institutions, have not taken clear positions in support of tax resistance.
Durland, who counsels tax resisters, says, “Some church body will have to declare that it stands by the Gospel and not by the IRS.
This could have a chain reaction effect and lead to a coalition of churches to make it work.”
What holds them back? According to Faw, many Brethren have expressed “concern
for the biblical ambiguities regarding taxes, concern over the maintenance of
a certain respectability, and fear of the consequences.” Durland is somewhat
more cynical, “The Pope speaks out against war and then honors the Italian
Army.”
What is the position of the churches?
The historic peace churches, representing 400,000 members in the United States, have been discussing the issue since .
In , the Church of the Brethren recommended that, “Although the Brethren cannot agree as to whether tax withholding is proper, they can all recognize the propriety of using the means of dissent which the social order itself recognizes… We recommend that all who feel concern be encouraged to express their protests through letters accompanying their tax returns, whether accompanied by payment or not.” Many employees of these churches have not been satisfied with this position and have urged church agencies to refuse to withhold their federal taxes, a violation of the law.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responded by challenging the constitutionality of withholding as an infringement on the right of religious expression.
In the Supreme Court ruled in AFSC v. U.S. that a lower court ruling in favor of the AFSC was invalid and ordered AFSC to continue to withhold.
The AFSC has complied with that order since.
Pressure from employees of the Mennonite Church to refuse to withhold led to the following resolution adopted in , “We request the General Board to engage in a serious and vigorous search to pursue all legal, legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from the legal requirement that the conference withhold income taxes from its employees.”
The New Call to Peacemaking
(NCP), a
more radical caucus within the three peace churches, has gone somewhat
further. In and again in
the
NCP
called upon members of the historic peace churches “to seriously consider
refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, as a response to
Christ’s call to radical discipleship.” However, attempts to go further and
adopt a position which called “paying for war a sin parallel to the sin of
fighting war” was rejected. As one pastor at the meeting said, “We are calling
my congregation into deep water when they haven’t even gotten their toes wet.”
The mainline Protestant denominations have reacted cautiously or ignored the issue.
There is a growing movement within the Unitarian Universalist Association to take a position in favor of tax resistance.
One of the leaders of this effort is Rev. Philip Zwerling of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.
He says, “Nowhere is military madness more manifest than in the nuclear arms race… and on one day of the year — April 15 — we break down and pay for it all… Is it not moral schizophrenia to blithely pick up the tab for the military mania that we speak out against?
It’s time to put our money where our mouth is.” However, for all the strength of this statement, the denomination as a whole has not adopted this position.
At the General Conference of the United
Methodist Church a resolution was adopted calling for support of those “who
conscientiously object to the payment of taxes for military purposes.” Here,
too, the group stopped short of calling on church agencies themselves to
engage in tax resistance.
Although large numbers of Roman Catholics are engaged in various forms of tax resistance, the church has taken no official position.
According to Father Bryan Hehir, Associate Secretary for International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference, “We have no policy on tax resistance… and I have not adopted a position intellectually on it.” Activist and author Father Daniel Berrigan thinks this position is becoming increasingly untenable, “More and more the question of paying federal taxes is going to become a question of conscience.
The government is stealing money and turning it into blood money.
We’re going to be pushed into a corner on whether we can recognize… our Christianity.”
Freund then recapped the example of (Catholic) Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.
Excerpts:
Addressing the Pacific Northwest Synod of the Lutheran Church in America… Hunthausen surprised his audience by suggesting what form their action might take, “I would like to share a vision of an action which could be taken: simply this — a sizable number of people in the State of Washington, 5,000, 10,000, a half million people refusing to pay 50 percent of their taxes in nonviolent resistance to nuclear murder and suicide… Form 1040 is the place where the Pentagon enters all of our lives, and asks our unthinking cooperation with the idol of nuclear destruction.
I think the teaching of Jesus tells us to render to a nuclear-armed Caesar what that Caesar deserves — tax resistance.”
Reaction in the community was mixed, but leaders of eight other Christian
denominations in Seattle announced their general support for the stand of the
Archbishop… However, they stopped short of endorsing tax resistance, saying
they would “encourage discussion of tax resistance” and offer support to
“those who refuse to pay taxes in protest of the arms race.”
At the time of his speech the Archbishop openly stated that he himself had not yet refused to pay taxes, but that it was troubling his conscience.
Several months later he acted.
In a pastoral letter published in the Seattle archdiocesan newspaper, Hunthausen declared, “After much prayer, thought, and personal struggle, I have decided to withhold 50 percent of my income taxes as a means of protesting our nation’s continuing involvement in the race for nuclear arms supremacy… I am saying by my action that in conscience I cannot support or acquiesce in a nuclear arms buildup which I consider a grave moral evil.”
…However, Pacific Northwest United Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert said that “while the city’s ecumenical leadership is supportive of Hunthausen, none has indicated that he or she is prepared to follow suit with similar personal acts of tax resistance.”
Freund ends the chapter with a nod to the World Peace Tax Fund Bill idea, taking it at face value and noting that “[c]hurch support is broad.”
This is the twenty-third in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it
was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal
of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
Here’s how Larry Cornies of the Gospel Herald
reported on the negotiations between the General Conference Mennonite Church
and the
IRS
(the Mennonite Church, with which Gospel Herald was
associated, was supporting the General Conference action but from a bit of a
distance):
Representatives of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Internal
Revenue Service failed to reach an 11th-hour
compromise at a meeting in Washington on
which would have averted a suit by the 63,000-member denomination against the
government agency.
IRS
officials at the meeting denied that there was any administrative solution to
the conference’s complaint that it must withhold the income taxes of its
employees, thereby acting as a tax collector for the state. The denomination
has argued, and will argue in a forthcoming judicial action, that the
IRS
requirement violates the concept of separation of church and state as embodied
in the First Amendment in the
U.S. Constitution.
“The 45-minute meeting was cordial, but unproductive,” said Vem Preheim,
general secretary for the conference. “We outlined our concerns about the
withholding issue as a historic peace church and described the problem which
the IRS
requirement poses for us.”
William Ball, the conference’s attorney in the matter, then formally asked
members of the
IRS’s
special working group on withholding issues whether there was any way to
exempt the General Conference from the problematic requirement.
Nancy Schuhmann, who chairs the special group, stated that the
IRS must
abide by its codes of operation and would not be able to offer an exemption on
tax withholding to the conference.
IRS
officials Susan Cunningham and Gail Libin were also present for the
discussions.
In light of the results of the
meeting, attorney Ball will complete the preparation of the conference
complaint and submit the brief to a
U.S. district court
after one last check to make sure all administrative possibilities have been
exhausted.
The General Conference’s General Board was authorized to initiate a judicial
action on the tax withholding question at an international gathering of the
conference membership at Estes Park,
Colo., in
.
More than a year earlier, on ,
delegates to a special midtriennium conference session instructed the General
Board to “use all legal, legislative, and administrative avenues for
achieving[”] conscientious objector exemption to the tax withholding
requirement.
John J. Hostetter, Jr. attacked
the new war tax resistance craze in a commentary titled “Render unto Caesar”:
In the , issue of the
Gospel Herald, the forms of protest on nuclear
weaponry advocated by
MCC,
Peace Section, include the following, “We call for acts of tax resistance to
be undertaken since our federal income taxes fuel the arms race. We suggest
giving funds denied for use in building nuclear weapons to groups working for
peace and disarmament, and to groups meeting human needs.”
Such statements are damaging and completely misleading. It gives the
impression to the uninformed that an option for taxpayers is withholding part
of their tax liability and sending it somewhere of their own choosing. Rather,
the choice is whether one pays his tax or whether he pays his tax plus penalty
and interest. The only other possibility at present is fraud for deliberately
not reporting income, which is even more serious.
Pick and choose from the budget? Most ethical and religious protestors
base their action on the notion that one can pick and choose in the budgetary
items of the government, as a shopper at a department store. It is implied
that taxes are a voluntary contribution to the government by its citizens and
therefore, if they don’t like the way the money is spent, they can withhold
the part of the contribution they don’t like.
The courts have long ago settled this also. There is a classic quotation from
Judge Learned Hand, “Over and over again courts have said that there is
nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as
possible. Everybody does so, rich and poor, and all do right, for nobody owes
any public duty to pay more than the law demands; taxes are enforced
exactions, not voluntary contributions.”
While one can so arrange his affairs to pay as little as possible within the
law, this does not imply the right to pay the part one likes and refuse the
rest any more than one can dictate how the groceryman uses the money paid for
groceries. Once the tax liability is assessed, it is no longer the taxpayer’s
money. Otherwise very few would pay any taxes since we all feel we have better
ways to spend money than the way the government spends it.
Some object to the defense budget, while others feel just as strongly about
the welfare program. Although far less than one tenth of one percent of church
people protest taxes to the point of refusing to voluntarily pay all of their
taxes without confiscation, yet probably a high percentage of Christians as
well as non-Christians would opt to send their tax money to a “Peace Fund”
were that option available. At present it is not. Perhaps in the future the
Congress may grant such an election in much the same way that taxpayers can
direct $1 of their taxes to the presidential election campaign. Even if such
were possible, it wouldn’t change the size of the budget for defense.
In the Waitzkin case of , the court said that
conscientious objectors couldn’t withhold 50 percent of their tax on the basis
of “war crimes” deduction. Neither religious beliefs nor international law
relieve citizens of tax liability. Tax is neutral on religious matters and is
imposed on all citizens, even though each may object to some specific
governmental expenditure on religious grounds.
Likewise in the McDade case, the “war crimes” deduction was disallowed. The
taxpayer’s belief that the government shouldn’t force its citizens to
participate in taking of lives didn’t relieve her of an obligation to pay tax.
In another case, the taxpayer’s deduction for “conscientious objection to
military expenditures” was denied and the negligence penalty imposed. Military
protest deduction wasn’t permitted under the code. Taxpayer lacked standing to
contest military expenditures of the government. (Reimer) In the Van Tol case,
the war tax credit was denied; sincerity of the taxpayer’s objection to war
didn’t excuse the tax liability.
The government gets the money. A few observations could be made. First,
such protestations, as sincere as they are, are not accomplishing what may be
the desire of the protest, in that the government ends up with more, not less,
money for undesirable purposes as a result of the protest. Not only will the
tax be collected, but penalty and interest as well. (The average increase is
$207 for penalty alone.)
Second, in the case of war or defense, not one cent less will be spent for
bullets, bombs, or battleships because of the protest. Tax money which we
might earmark for Cambodian Relief, as good as that might be, only means other
money out of the same treasury is used for what the Congress believes is
necessary for national defense, and if that is not enough, the government will
simply borrow what it needs. One who thinks that such a fund will change the
size of national defense has only a superficial method of salving his
conscience.
Third, Internal Revenue agents, with (against) whom I have worked, openly joke
at such protest tactics. Regardless of the agents’ own personal views on the
use of tax money, which all citizens agree leaves much to be desired, they as
public servants must go and collect the tax whether it is from an impoverished
taxpayer, a religious protestor, or a fraudulent evader. Thus all that is
accomplished is a reduction in efficiency and an increase in the cost of
collection in the tax system. The Revenue Service doesn’t make the laws;
Congress does. A much more valid approach is correspondence with those in
Congress responsible for the present law and who have the power to change it.
Certainly the revenue agents have no jurisdiction over setting up the national
budget.
Internal Revenue agents deserve our respect. They are, with some exceptions,
well trained and conscientious, doing a job necessary to insure compliance and
integrity in the tax system. (After all, Jesus selected one as one of his
disciples. While he wasn’t the star of the show, he certainly wasn’t the
villain either.)
It would be interesting to know what percentage of church people have ever
written to their congressman expressing their concern on militarism. The
percentage would probably increase if names and addresses of congressmen were
available on church bulletin boards with sample letters for those who want
some positive ways to express their concerns.
I cringe when reports come out in the paper of tax protestors who have been
convicted of tax evasion on religious grounds with a byline that they are
Mennonites, with the implied impression that this is a belief of such
churches. Mennonites do not believe that. Editors of newspapers and
periodicals should be corrected when it is implied. The vast majority of
Christians believe such a stance to be unscriptural teaching.
This prompted a series of letters to the editor in response:
Called Hotstetter’s commentary “a breath of fresh air” and said “the newer
viewpoint promoted so much presently is not the historical nor the
majority viewpoint of the Mennonite brotherhood.”
“I differ from his assessment that those in our churches who cannot in
Christian conscience pay war taxes are ‘simply being contrary.’ That seems
to me to be a judgment form the world rather than the Word. I believe
that, increasingly, those who have ears to hear will understand that,
while it may be contrary to the world, to resist payment of war taxes is
being faithful to the Word of God.”
The failure of the General Conference Mennonite Church to reach an agreement
with the Internal Revenue Service… should come as no surprise. Furthermore,
if the case goes to court the winner can be predicted with a considerable
degree of assurance. It will be Attorney Ball in collecting his fee. It is
to be hoped that our church does not emulate the unenviable position in
which that church now finds itself. It can hardly back down without
swallowing its pride and cannot push forward with any hope of success in the
untenable stance it is taking. The constituency should scream at using so
much funds on such a case.
The requirement of the service to withhold taxes and forward them to the
government is nothing new. It has been on the books for more than a
generation. If they had not signed the waiver on Social Security taxes, they
would have more of a leg to stand on. They can’t have it both ways.
Felt that even if Hostetter’s arguments were valid, “there is still the
conviction, scripturally based, that we must witness to Christ’s way of
peace. Our quiet support for the military as we pay our taxes each year is
not consistent with that witness.” Says Flickinger: “Christian war tax
resisters are basing their actions on Scripture, not on a desire to
attract persecution or publicity.”
The issue included an
editorial,
“As for taxes…”,
from Daniel Hertzler. There wasn’t much meat there. It talked around the
subject for the most part, though it did mention Hertzler’s own
dipping-his-toes-in: “For a time I resisted the telephone tax, but then I gave
up. Perhaps I was a little overly impressed by the threatening form letters
which began to come from the Internal Revenue Service. Also, tax refusal seemed
like a form of revolution. As an orderly Mennonite, revolution is not my
style.”
That prompted Art Landis to shoot back in the issue with
a letter to the editor
taking Hertzler to task for romanticizing earlier generations who “had no
compassion for the slave or the prisoner. I believe the state could have
constructed concentration camps and gas ovens next to their meetinghouses and
they would not have protested.”
Good statements can have a reverse and negative effect… The statement can
serve to immunize us and keep us from action. We have resolved our guilt by
preparing another statement. This statement calls for a radical change of
lifestyle. Guilt and inner conflict are not as easily laid aside as this
statement might indicate. Wrestling with the complex issues of peace does not
successfully reduce inner conflict. What would really happen if “the old self
that lives for self dies”? We call into judgment economic systems that keep
millions poor when we ourselves are very deeply rooted in that economic
system. We denounce wars, but no consensus can be reached regarding applying
the same biblical understanding to paying for the hardware of war as we have
for giving of our bodies for war.
[A]t Bowling Green when a brother expressed
his concern over the assembly’s failure to deal with the question of obedience
as it relates to payment of taxes for war. Even though long discussion
followed, business proceeded very much as usual…
The question that comes to my mind is whether we indeed should make statements
such as these when we know well enough that the very structures of our
institutions would be shattered if we attempted to live out the text of the
statement.
Responding to Seattle Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s call for a tax
revolt against the nuclear arms race, Lutheran pacifists have urged
co-religionists to join the protest, redirecting the money to the poor. “We
shall act on Bishop Hunthausen’s encouragement to resist a percentage of our
federal income tax that is symbolic of allocations made to the military,” said
the New York-based Lutheran Peace Fellowship, an independent intra-Lutheran
group which works with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
“We will no longer offer our tax dollars for a nuclear military that affronts
the lordship of Jesus. Instead, we choose to redirect resisted tax dollars to
the poor of our country and of our world.”
Conscientious tax resisters who were hoping the courts would find a place for
them in the U.S.
Constitution were disappointed (Levi Miller reporting):
Amish employers and employees cannot invoke their religious beliefs to avoid
paying Social Security and federal unemployment taxes, the Supreme Court ruled
on .
The unanimous decision overturned a western Pennsylvania judge’s ruling that
forcing the Amish to pay such taxes violates their freedom of religion.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said, “The design of the [Social Security]
system requires support by mandatory contributions from covered employers and
employees.”
The controversy arose when the internal Revenue Service informed Edwin Lee, an
Old Order Amish carpenter from Lawrence County,
Pa., that he owed some
$27,000 in back taxes. Lee had not paid any Social Security taxes for himself
or his employees since . He also had not
withheld such taxes.
It was noted in the ruling that Congress has already provided for a tax
exemption that covers self-employed Amish, such as farmers. The Amish believe
that the church and the family should take care of the elderly and do not
withdraw the government funds at old age.
John A. Hostetler, a professor at Temple University and member of the Plains
Mennonite Church, commented on the ruling by saying that although “it is a
blow for religious liberty in general, in the long run it is better for the
Amish to pay it. If they were exempt, it would create jealousy.”
Hostetler said he did not know how many of these small shops would be
involved. “It will mean more paperwork for them,” he concluded.
A follow-up by Phil Shenk explained the consequences for war tax resisters:
The U.S. Supreme
Court indirectly referred to the issue of war tax resistance and the World
Peace Tax Fund in its
ruling, denying an Amish employer exemption from paying and collecting Social
Security taxes.
The unanimous decision, plus the arguments employed by the court, may also
have diminished the prospects for success in the General Conference Mennonite
Church’s case asking for an employer’s exemption from collecting
federal-military income taxes for the government.
In the Amish case, Amishman Edwin Lee had refused to withhold Social Security
taxes from his Amish employees’ paychecks and failed to pay the employer’s
share of their Social Security taxes, claiming that doing so would violate his
and his employees’ First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion.
Lee said the Amish believe it is sinful not to provide for their elderly and
needy themselves and therefore are opposed to the national social security
system.
Unlike the celebrated case, in which the
Supreme Court granted the Amish an exemption from Wisconsin’s compulsory
school-attendance law based on their free exercise of religion rights, the
Supreme Court here held that the government’s interest should overrule the
religious rights of the individual because it would be difficult for the
Social Security system to accommodate the “myriad exceptions flowing from a
wide variety of religious beliefs.”
In ruling that Amishman Lee’s First Amendment religious rights must “yield to
the common good,” the Supreme Court raised the issue of conscientious
objectors’ refusal to pay taxes that go for what the court called “war-related
activities.” The court said it could not see any difference between Lee’s
refusal to pay Social Security taxes and the position of one who refuses to
pay war taxes.
“If, for example, a religious adherent believes war is a sin, and if a certain
percentage of the federal budget can be identified as devoted to war-related
activities, such individuals would have a similarly valid claim to be exempt
from paying that percentage of the income tax.”
The problem with this, the court said, is that “[t]he tax system could not
function if denominations were allowed to challenge the tax system because tax
payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.”
In a very broad statement that implicitly referred to religious conscientious
objection to federal-military income taxes as well as Social Security taxes,
the court revealed its basic rule: “Because the broad public interest in
maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in
conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.”
The court did recognize that Congress has passed a constitutionally sound law
that exempts Amish who are self-employed from paying Social Security taxes.
But it held that taxes imposed on employers “must be uniformly applicable to
all, except as Congress provides explicitly otherwise.” Because Congress has
not exempted Amish employers or their employees from Social Security taxes,
the court refused to honor their religious rights over the interests of the
nation as a whole.
Before Congress, in the proposed World Peace Tax Fund legislation, is explicit
language that would “exempt” conscientious objectors from paying war taxes and
instead divert their taxes to peaceful governmental activities. If passed,
this might provide the authority the court has implied it needs before it will
honor the rights of war tax objectors.
A Mennonite lawyer, John Yoder, is working as one of several assistants to
Chief Justice Burger, the author of the opinion striking down Amishman Lee’s
free exercise of religion rights. Burger’s Mennonite aide is originally from
Hesston, Kan.
The decision was so gratuitously dismissive of conscientious tax refusal that
the General Conference Mennonite Church decided to
halt its legal action,
on :
In the light of a negative judgment rendered by the
U.S. Supreme Court
against an Amish employer on ,
the General Conference’s judicial action committee has recommended to the
denomination’s General Board that a planned suit against the
IRS on
the issue of tax withholding “be put on indefinite hold.” The committee’s
decision came at the end of a
conference call with William Ball, who has been preparing the case
on behalf of the church group over the past year. During the telephone
meeting, Ball indicated that, considering the Supreme Court ruling in the case
IRS vs. Lee,
the General Conference would almost certainly lose its case.
In a cover story in the issue
Donald B. Kraybill proposed some ideas on
what to do about the threat of nuclear war.
Idea #10 was “Refuse to pay some of your federal income taxes as a witness to
your faith. If you’re scared, try a small amount like $7.77. If that’s too
scary, at least send a letter describing the difficulty of praying for peace
and paying for war. Those who pay taxes without sending such a letter are
quietly condoning and supporting the nuclear arms buildup.”
Raymond Hunthausen’s war tax resistance, which had been alluded to earlier, was
covered in a brief note:
Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen announced that he will withhold half
of his income tax to protest “our nation’s
continuing involvement in the race for nuclear arms supremacy.”
“As Christians imbued with the spirit of peacemaking expressed by the Lord in
the Sermon on the Mount, we must find ways to make known our objections to the
present concentration on further nuclear arms buildup,” the archbishop told
300 peace activists attending a meeting at Notre Dame University.
In the issue, Ivan H.
Stoltzfus felt compelled to write in to explain
“Why I pay taxes.”
The standard set of bible verses were deployed to explain that worldly goods
are at the disposal of worldly governments; Rome’s government was no better
than ours, so Paul’s advice in Romans 13 still holds; besides, it’s impossible
to determine what percentage of your taxes are objectionable, so you might as
well pay the whole thing. Still, Stoltzfus wrote, if there were a Peace Tax
Fund law, he’d go along with it.
A senate of priests in Iowa has voted to support a Catholic lay minister who
refuses to pay his federal income taxes as a protest against the nuclear arms
race.
The resolution approved by the representative group of priests in the Dubuque
Catholic archdiocese says they commend Tom Cordaro and
St. Thomas Aquinas parish at
Ames for their courageous stand relative to the payment of taxes for military
and nuclear armaments.
Mr. Cordaro, 27, has held back most of his income taxes
because he believes it would be a
sin to contribute money for nuclear weapons. The parish council at
St. Thomas Aquinas has refused
to honor an order by the Internal Revenue Service to turn over Mr. Cordaro’s
wages to satisfy the $828 tax debt.
Dan E. Hoellwarth made another attempt to defang Romans 13 in the
issue. According to him, the
description of government in that chapter should be seen as prescriptive, not
descriptive, and is meant to restrict which sorts of governments Christians owe
allegiance to: “what if the leaders are not acting in accordance with Scripture?”
“Obviously we should pay taxes… However…”
The Catholic war tax resisters were back again in the
issue:
The Catholic peace advocate Daniel Berrigan says he will take the church’s
anti-nuclear arms movement seriously “when we have a few bishops in jail.[”]
Berrigan, who is appealing a 3–10 year prison sentence for breaking into a
Pennsylvania nuclear plant, spoke to some 200 students and faculty members at
Fordham University.
The Jesuit priest said this “unparalleled threat to our survival” has made
civil disobedience — such as demonstrations and withholding federal income
taxes — a necessary component of the anti-nuclear movement.
He said he was encouraged by the fact that the American church hierarchy no
longer engages in “cold-war” rhetoric, and that the peace movement has made
some strides. But he added that the church, like the rest of the anti-nuclear
movement, has only “moved the diameter of a dime” toward serious opposition to
the arms race.
A Methodist pastor and wife in Portland, Oregon, withheld $1500 from their
U.S. income taxes.
They turned $1,000 of the money into $5 bills and gave them to persons they
found in line at the state of Oregon employment service.
According to the United Methodist John and Pat Schwiebert “clipped [a note] to
each $5 bill explaining that the couple was withholding a portion of their tax
‘because we cannot in good conscience do nothing while income we have earned
is used by our government to plan and carry out the killing of human beings…’ ”
After nearly a year in Laos, we feel a bit of fire brewing in our bones.
Surely, we think, the church can offer an alternative and a “no” to the
militarism and violence that is increasingly manifested around the world.
Surely we have a responsibility to end such suffering. Yet, as we turn to our
church papers (which we read avidly even though they arrive 4 to 5 months
late) we find that much of the discussion on peacemaking, including war-tax
resistance, seems to focus on the interpretation of certain biblical passages.
While it is important that these passages shape our thoughts and direct our
lives, it seems that too much time is spent fine-tuning favorite arguments in
comfortable, safe settings, far removed from the cries of those who suffer. We
wonder, for example, how well our arguments would stand up if the bombing
which occurred in many areas of Laos had instead destroyed our own communities
in Kansas, Ohio, or Manitoba.
The oil lamps burned late into the night when we visited the village. The day
before a Lao woman, the mother of 11 children, was killed when her hoe struck
a small anti-personnel bomblet that had buried itself under a root in her
garden. The bomblet, one of hundreds which still litter the soil, had been
dropped 10 to 15 years ago… Looking at the depression left in the soil by the
explosion, the hoe fragment, and the saddened eyes of the 10-year-old
daughter, we wondered who would own this family’s grief… who would answer for
this woman’s death?
The answer, we fear, is no one. Indeed the United States has created a
military system which can kill in such a way that no one need feel guilty.
Certainly no one in America, army general or taxpayer, will be accused of
plotting the death of this peasant woman. No international court will bring
bomb manufacturing companies to trial. Even to know which pilot dropped that
particular bomblet some ten years ago would be impossible. Thus we have
created death without a murderer.
Are we really so clever? Have we finally outwitted God, who would come and
ask, “Where is Abel, your brother?” Indeed, if God should come and ask, would
he not find us all guilty?
Of course, we as historic peace churches have often tried to separate
ourselves from our nation’s militaristic policies, to be a people with a
different identity. To some extent we have succeeded. The very fact that
Mennonite Central Committee is allowed to be in Laos is in large measure due
to the fact that we, as Mennonites, did not fight as
U.S. soldiers in
Indochina.
Nevertheless, how clean are we? Are our self-perceptions of innocence
realistic? Or have we been lured into a giant game of guilt evasion whose
players include Pentagon officials and common folk alike? While we ourselves
have not worn a soldier’s uniform, have not our taxes and our silence helped
to build weapons systems and to pay the salaries of those who fight? Though we
have espoused love and peace, could any of us stand before that peasant
woman’s family and state with assurance that we did not contribute to the
making of the weapon that killed her?
Thus, the presence of the shattered family in Muong Kham or the “cave
dwellers” in Sam Neua is disquieting to our spirits — the links between our
tax money and their suffering are too strong to ignore. The option of war tax
resistance then seems not like a matter for debate, but the next logical step
for all Christians who would work for peace in the world.
Perhaps many of you will disagree with us that withholding taxes is a faithful
part of peacemaking. May we plead however that before final judgments are
made, you listen to the voices of those hurt by our violence? Standing close
to them, we need to respond with compassion. What will we say? What will we
do?
A letter to the editor
from Robin Lowery followed: “They [the Peacheys] seem to base their conclusion
on the experience of those they dialogued with rather than on what God our
Father says to us through the Bible,” Lowery wrote. “It is a dangerous thing to
base our faith on experience and feelings.” We shouldn’t expect governments to
live up to Christian principles. Our worldly life is only temporary; we are
guests here and live under worldly rules temporarily. “War is a horrible thing,
but even more terrible is the judgment waiting for those who would oppose God
and what he has put in place.”
A
letter to the editor
from the Peacheys complained that their original article had been severely
edited:
As edited by Gospel Herald, our article seemed to
imply that all true peacemakers will engage in war-tax resistance. Certainly
we were urging Christians to seriously consider making some type of witness
with their tax return. Our original article acknowledged, however, that this
could take many forms. Some people may choose to live with an income below the
taxable level while others may wish to enclose a letter of concern with their
tax return. Some may withhold a symbolic amount while others withhold all of
their taxes.
Yet, none of these actions can be the whole of peacemaking. Rather, as we
stressed in our original submission, peacemaking is a total way of life which
embraces our troublesome next-door neighbor as well as those whom our country
defines as “enemy.” Further, as we seek to prevent suffering caused by North
American militarism, we must also turn to those in our communities who have
been cut off from help by our nation’s preoccupation with defense “needs.”
Finally, all of our actions must spring from our Christian faith. We cannot
work for peace out of guilt or a desire for personal innocence. Instead, what
we do, we do joyfully as a positive witness to life, to wholeness, and to our
faith in God who loves all people, irrespective of human barriers.
And Titus Peachey also wrote a follow-up article. Here is
an excerpt
that touches on war tax resistance:
The U.S.
asks neither for our consent or direct physical participation to send
weapons around the world such as the cluster bombs which were dropped in
Laos. It requires only our dollars and our silence. Can we continue to
give our government what it needs to make wars, and then serve the victims
of its violence with a clear conscience? Can we still claim to be
nonresistant if that violence was committed in defense of our way of life
in another part of the world?
Some of us felt that the shovels provided to Lao farmers in Xieng
Khouang should be purchased with money which Mennonites withheld from
their taxes, thereby making the connection between our nation’s militarism
and the victims of war. While some of the shovels were indeed purchased
with the Taxes for Peace Fund, many people cited legal, theological, and
practical problems with taking such an action.
From our vantage point in Laos, we admittedly worry more about the
theological, human, and practical problems of inaction. Can we
find common ground for a strong, unified, Mennonite peace witness which
deals more directly with our nation’s defense budget, arms sales, and
military aid?
MCC
has spent over $10,000 to purchase and ship about 1,200 shovels to Laos, and
$4,000 of that amount was allocated from
MCC’s
“Taxes for Peace” fund. This “Taxes for Peace” fund was established in
to receive contributions from church members
who had voluntarily withheld portions of their taxes as a symbolic protest
against the government’s excessive spending for military purposes.
“Since people withheld this money so that it could be used for peace instead
of war, we feel it especially appropriate that these dollars be used to help
clear the land of Laos of bomblets made and dropped by Americans,” explains
John Stoner, executive secretary of
MCC
U.S. Peace Section.
What is the meaning of conscientious objection to war in Canada today, and how
does this relate to the support of Canadian military industries and armed
forces activities? That is the focus of a task force on tax support of
Canadian military activities. A short document spelling out proposed goals and
research tasks of this group was mailed to each of the conferences earlier
this year asking for more guidance or support, perhaps after discussion at
their annual meetings. The initial work of this task force is being
coordinated by the Peace and Social Concerns office of
MCC
(Canada).
War tax resisters continued to have tough luck in
U.S. courts, as
this showed:
A Rhode Island couple who have refused to pay their federal income taxes
as a way of demonstrating their
opposition to military spending have lost their fight with the
U.S. Internal
Revenue Service. The United States Tax Court in Washington has not only
ordered Kevin and Linda Regan to pay $4,138 in back taxes and $206 in interest
for , but it has also slapped
the couple with a $500 fine for having “wasted” the government’s time and
money on “frivolous” actions. Although the decision was reached
, the
IRS
office here only announced it .
Keith Johnson, an
IRS
public affairs officer, said the agency was publicizing the Tax Court decision
because the Regans had been the subject of a long
Providence Journal-Bulletin story
in which the couple attempted to
justify their nonpayment of taxes on religious and moral grounds. In the
interview, the Regans argued that the arms race contradicted the Christian
belief against the taking of human life. “What we were presented with were
taxpayers who were saying they could withhold tax payments on moral grounds,”
Mr. Johnson said. “This is an argument that neither the
IRS,
nor the courts, accept.”
Finally, a
letter to the editor
from Weldon Nisly emphasized the parallel between conscientious objection to
the draft and conscientious objection to military taxation:
May we all have the faith and courage to stand with these young men of
conscience facing draft registration. It is indeed a difficult moment and
decision they and their families face. But it is not just they who face the
demands of the powers in our country and time. We all face a parallel decision
in a direct way with the demand for tax money to finance the Pentagon’s
headlong plunge toward death and destruction of all God’s creation and
creatures. The painful question of faith we ail face is will we contribute to
and cooperate with that demand of the powers or will we choose to place our
trust in God alone?
Dick and Evelyn Freeman penned this Catholic defense of war tax resistance for the Catholic Worker:
Don’t Pay War Taxes
By Dick and Evelyn Freeman
We met Stanley Vishnewski for the first time in .
He was visiting our friends in Baltimore, Willa Bickham and Brendan Walsh, at their Catholic Worker home, Viva House.
Stanley is a joyful man, and, after little persuasion, he shared with us his slide show and oral history of the Catholic Worker.
Stanley’s message, of course, was that we share a particularly Catholic social tradition of pacifism, personalism, and for some, voluntary poverty.
It has always been a struggle to affirm this tradition, especially when confronting the ikons of the day.
Sometimes we find it as much a struggle to explain our affirmations to fellow Catholics!
Faith so easily blends into national culture, and we become technicians for the American state.
The state plays its part well, beginning with the insistence that we pay income tax.
Affirming our tradition, however, we refuse to pay that tax because the government uses the money to develop and deploy murderous nuclear and conventional weapons and to pay off a national debt incurred mostly during past wars.
Ours is an act of pacifism in general, and of nuclear pacifism in particular.
It is firmly rooted in modern Catholic thought.
Today it is common knowledge that the United States spends annually more than 50% of its revenue for the military. U.S. leaders have announced as national policy, first implemented by Truman, the potential first use of nuclear weapons.
If that weren’t enough, they threaten to conduct nuclear war — somehow limited.
National leaders, particularly in the US and USSR, have had thirty years to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and they have failed on a massive scale.
Their failure can be measured in megatons.
Every tax dollar supports this madness.
You cannot just send your tax to the Department of Labor and ask them to provide someone with a minimum income.
Some people tried, during the Vietnam war, to send their money to government agencies that were not involved, other than by their silence, in that war.
But the IRS ruled that checks paid to a government agency had to be treated as if paid to the United States.
As Catholics we cannot at one moment refer to people as brothers and sisters, and at another, pay our government to prepare to burn, blast or irradiate them.
Nor can we wait until the Congress gives us legal permission, as in the World Peace Fund Act, to insure that the military does not get our tax dollars.
We must simply refuse to pay the tax.
In the light of recent events we may justly urge fellow Catholics to refuse tax payment, and to seek the full support of the bishops as representatives of the institutional Church in America.
In , the Vatican sent a plea for disarmament to the United Nations.
It condemned the arms race, even when motivated by a concern for a legitimate defense, as a danger, in terms of the potential use of nuclear weapons; as an injustice, by asserting the primacy of force and by stealing resources from the poor for use in weapons construction; as a mistake and a wrong, by instilling the fear in workers that they will have no work if they do not produce weapons; as a folly, because neither conventional nor nuclear weapons ensure a stable peace.
Pacem in Terris and Pope Paul’s statements for Peace Day (January 1) and , are as explicit and as forceful.
We would do well to reflect on them in our parish and diocesan communities.
We should not simply submerge our faith in the nation’s nuclear pastime.
Yet some will object that we need, as a prerequisite for acting, specific pastoral instruction about tax refusal.
Some will say that we must give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.
We now find ourselves as we were during the many, many years before the bishops’ statement on conscientious objection and selective conscientious objection in .
There is sufficient teaching with which to form our “correct consciences”; individually, and in our communities, we need not wait.
The government’s acts in preparation for nuclear and conventional war are clearly opposed to the moral code which has God as its source.
Because its acts are immoral, the government lacks authority to command us to pay its tax.
As Pope John taught,
Since the right to command is required by the moral order and has its source in God, it follows that, if civil authorities pass laws or command anything opposed to the moral order and consequently to the will of God, neither the laws made nor the authorization granted can be binding on the consciences of the citizens, since “God has more right to be obeyed than men.”
The National Catholic News Service covered John Egan’s tax resistance again, in a dispatch:
Priest Refuses to File Tax Return as Protest
Jersey City, N.J. (NC)— For the third consecutive year, a priest here has written to the Internal Revenue Service and declined to file a federal tax return.
Father John P. Egan of St. Boniface parish, in his most recent letter to the IRS, said he does not intend to file a return in protest against government expenditures for armaments and the support of certain foreign governments.
While Father Egan is subject to prosecution, his letters have never been answered and no action has been taken against him.
Since he retains none of his salary he would not owe any taxes.
In his letter he cited Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines and Haiti as “dictatorships supported by U.S. taxpayers’ money.”
He also charged that “hard-earned money from folks in this country encouraged the recent bloody coup in Thailand where a democratic government was overthrown.”
“People say we are at peace,” he wrote, “but such peace is an illusion that keeps us going our merry way and preserves our consciences from any healthy challenges… Nuclear priorities are a war against the poor.”
He said tax resistance is a step in the direction of eliminating weapons.
“It is a way to celebrate life by refusing to worship the death of others as security or solution.
It is a way of saying that the laying down of arms so we can embrace each other as brothers and sisters is the only true solution, the only true security.”
Father Egan has been active in anti-war groups and has campaigned for prison reform.
The following brief letter-to-the-editor appeared in the Catholic Worker:
Our Lady of Presentation 2012 Westwood Northern Blvd Cincinnati, Ohio 45225
Dear Fellow Workers,
I am a priest and a war tax resister.
I am interested in knowing if there are other priests who have refused to pay income or telephone tax in opposition to our war economy.
If you would kindly publish this letter, we may be able at least to know about one another and possibly to encourage and support one another in living this decision.
Thank you.
God bless you
Fr. Al Lauer
A National Catholic News Service dispatch from about a recent talk by Daniel Berrigan ended with a quote from Berrigan in which he said: “If we had a quiet groundswell of tax refusal around the country, they couldn’t build this stuff” [e.g. nuclear weapons].
Another dispatch, from read:
“Peace” Churches Ask Tax Resistance to Military Spending
Green Lakes, Wis. (NC)— Three hundred delegates of three historic “peace” churches have urged their members to use civil disobedience, including tax resistance, to emphasize their opposition to militarism and their support for “worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons.”
The delegates met at a “New Call to Peace-Making” that followed 26 regional meetings over the past two years.
The meeting was sponsored by the Friends (Quakers), the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, who have a combined membership of about 400,000 persons.
The delegates urged their church members “to seriously consider refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.”
They said military expenditures take up about half of all federal taxes.
The delegates also opposed restoration of the draft.
They called for a meeting with President Carter to “commend and support him in his concern for peace and human rights” and to tell him of their “concerns about military spending, nuclear weapons, arms sales and related matters.”
Eileen Egan, a member of Pax Christi, a Catholic peace group, said she attended the meeting as a representative of Catholic pacifists.
She said Catholics should join the “peace” churches in their pacifism.
