Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → American conservative arguments for tax resistance → Howard G. Pennington

Here are a couple of examples of American social security tax resisters from back in the day. First, from the Amsterdam, New York, Evening Recorder from this day in 1940:

Man, Jailed for Defying NRA in ’34, Now Refuses to Pay Security Taxes

Uncle Sam to Sell Trucks Of Battery Manufacturer To Satisfy $105 Claim; Penna. Also Files Suit

York, Pa., Jan. 8. — (AP) — Uncle Sam raised an auctioneer’s hammer today above two trucks seized from government-defying Fred Perkins and said more of Perkins’ property would be taken unless the sale satisfies a social securities tax claim.

The trucks were confiscated from the York battery manufacturer last month because he refused to pay $105.36 in social security taxes, penalties and interest.

Today’s auction at the post office garage marked another round in the Perkins-versus-New Deal battle which began in 1934 when he went to jail for 18 days for defying the NRA. [He had apparently paid less than the 40¢/hour minimum wage set by that New Deal federal office. The Supreme Court later ruled the NRA was unconstitutional, and so the government abandoned its defense of the conviction against Perkins while he was appealing it.]

The 61-year-old former Cornell University football player, who also is in hot water with the State of Pennsylvania for non-payment of unemployment compensation taxes, said he would try to buy back his trucks.

Sale of the trucks to Perkins for less than the amount of the government’s claim, said Henry L. Haines, chief field deputy of the internal revenue office in Philadelphia, means that they will be seized again. If they go to another bidder and the claim remains unfulfilled, regulations provide that more of Perkins’ property be confiscated until the taxes and costs are paid in full.

On the other hand. Haines explained, Perkins can make a settlement before the hammer falls or can erase the claim by buying his trucks for a price equal to his unpaid taxes plus costs.

Since Federal agents took Perkins up on his challenge to “come and get it” [an earlier article had quoted him as saying “I ask the government if it has the courage to enforce this law.”] and seized the trucks December 28, he has been delivering batteries in his son’s roadster.

The state plans to sue Perkins this week unless he pays $222.41 in job taxes — an expense he declares he “can’t afford.” Perkins employs only six or seven men.

In another article, Perkins explained:

“I certainly don’t intend to pay the State taxes. I haven’t made any net profits and can’t afford to pay them. My net earnings for 1937–38–39 were less than my employes’. … We should tax employers who lay off their employes. Don’t soak the man who gives his employes steady employment — at least the small business man. What is morally wrong is never politically right.”

Another newspaper quoted him as calling on “every self-respecting and oppressed employer in the state of Pennsylvania to join me in refusing to pay another cent in payroll taxes — come what may.”

Here’s another example, from 1952:

Social Security “Immoral, Illegal”

Woman Editor Defies U.S. on Old Age Tax

Summit, Miss. — (U.P.) — A fiery woman editor and recent unsuccessful candidate for governor declared today she will not pay Social Security taxes and challenged the Federal Government to do something about it.

Mrs. Mary D. Cain, editor of the weekly Summit Sun, wrote an open letter to Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder, denouncing Social Security as “immoral and illegal.”

Mrs. Cain said she will refuse to pay the new self-employment tax on herself and also will not deduct Social Security payments from the salaries of employes.

“Pop your whip, Mr. Snyder, I’m ready,” she wrote. “Either confiscate my business or put me in prison.”

She said she hopes the government will imprison her for not paying the tax “because then the people of America will realize to what a pretty pass we have come in this country when one can be imprisoned or heavily fined for simply doing what has ever been considered the honorable, American way of living — taking care of one’s own old age.”

“The Social Security program, added to the equally iniquitous and confiscatory income tax program, is the hub around which the whole wheel of communism revolves in this country,

“I’ve had enough of the New Deal. I’m sick of the whole Truman administration. Pop your whip, Mr. Snyder, I am ready.”

We’ve met Mary Cain before. But this article was accompanied by some photos and a caption about a social security tax resistance and redirection action I hadn’t heard about before:

It took me a while to find any more about this action, but I finally found this:

Money Owed U.S. Given To Oldster

Detroit, March 12 [1952]. — A one-man revolt against the government’s new social security tax on self-employed business men was waged today by Howard Pennington, partner in a wholesale tobacco and candy firm in suburban Lincoln Park.

Pennington wrote the internal revenue collector that he would not pay his $81 tax and that he had sent that amount of money to a 72-year-old pensioner in Ypsilanti, Mich. The pensioner, George Robinett, recently was deprived of three months of his social security pension, a total of $210, because he earned 62 cents more than the $50 monthly wage to which a pensioner is limited.

Pennington’s refusal was based on his contention that he would pay at least $3000 “for nothing” under the tax because he wouldn’t mismanage his business sufficiently to remain qualified to receive a pension in return. He said he objected to turning over his money “for waste by socialistic dreamers.”

Last month the statute of limitations erased another year of my taxes. For the 2009 tax year, my 1040 form showed that I owed $1,203 in federal taxes. I didn’t pay, of course, and the IRS has been nagging me about that ever since. But now it’s too late for them, as ten years have expired as they failed to collect.

I celebrated by sending a check for $1,203 to our local food bank program.

(Coincidentally, on the same day I sent the check, I got my $1,200 stimulus check from the U.S. Treasury. I’m not sure how to interpret that, cosmically-like, except that it seemed to rhyme like poetry.)

This is an example of the tax resistance tactic of “redirection.” Here is an excerpt from 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns that describes this tactic:

Redirect Resisted Taxes to Charity

Governments spend a lot of time and energy—and enlist a host of political scientists and pundits and other such clergy—to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and even charitable, while failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.

Governments and other critics of tax resistance are quick to deploy this already-available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. They criticize tax resisters as freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them—as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.

One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging giveaways of their resisted taxes. This makes it clear that the resisters do not have merely selfish motives for resisting, and also demonstrates that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).

This sort of tax redirection also can forge or strengthen ties between the resisters and the recipients, and can make more people aware of tax resistance as an option.

War tax resisters

This tactic is put to particularly good use by the contemporary war tax resistance movement. Here are some examples:

When Julia “Butterfly” Hill refused to pay more than $150,000 in taxes to the U.S. government in 2003, she made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:

I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.

NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in 2008. It encouraged war tax resisters across the country to coordinate by redirecting their refused taxes to either of two groups: one that provided healthcare in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and one that helped Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference to give oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 to spokespeople for these campaigns.

The People’s Life Fund is associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and holds redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from a resister, that resister can reclaim his or her deposits to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually these grants are modest—$500 or $1,000 each—but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and helps the word about war tax resistance spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups in the United States.

A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from its redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been banned from applying for government financial aid because of their refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial. These actions helped to forge or sustain ties between the war tax resistance movement and anti-conscription activists and gave war tax resistance a higher profile in the larger anti-war movement.

One family figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: In 1997 they redirected their refused federal taxes to a charitable program called “Childreach.” That year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal government agency, had promised to match private donations to Childreach two-to-one from its budget, so the family’s $211.69 in redirected taxes had the effect of pulling an additional $423.38 from the U.S. government for a good cause.

In 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”

John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: They redirected their taxes by handing out five-dollar bills to people standing in line at the unemployment office. Along with the bills, they handed out letters in which they explained their redirection action. To amplify the public relations impact, they notified the media of their plans ahead of time. “Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR,” according to one report, “and they received letters and cards from around the world.”

In 1972 a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”

Arthur Evans felt that if redirecting your war taxes to charity was a good idea, redirecting twice your war taxes to charity must be twice as good. In 1965 he wrote to the IRS to tell them “I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.”

In the early 1970s, farmers who were resisting the expansion of a military base onto their land in Larzac, France, found common cause with war tax resisters. Thousands of war tax resisters there redirected their war taxes to help fund the Larzac struggle.

And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here: When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in 1998, she threw a fund-raising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money—but not in order to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”

British women’s suffrage movement

The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, signing her letter “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote to the editor of a suffragist paper to suggest that women should redirect their taxes from the government to a privately-run war relief charity “and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Suffrage activist Charlotte Despard reported that “she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”

Social Security foe

In 1952, Howard Pennington, unwilling to pay an $81 social security tax “for waste by socialistic dreamers,” instead sent that money directly to George Robinett. Robinett was a 72-year-old retiree whose social security had been abruptly cut off for three months, costing him $210, because during one month he had earned 62 cents above the $50 maximum monthly earnings for a social security recipient.