Revenue to the U.S. government from excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and ammunition is sharply up.
This is largely from higher tax rates on tobacco, firearms, and ammunition, but also possibly from a surge in firearms & ammunition purchases in the wake of national Democratic election victories which caused some people to anticipate stricter gun control would be on the way.
I haven’t had time to go over this in detail, but a new paper from professor Nancy Staudt looks at how the U.S. judiciary uses its power to raise funds for the military during wartime — a responsibility nominally reserved for the legislative branch.
Counseling Notes — how tax resisters can avoid getting preyed upon by “settle with the IRS for pennies on the dollar” companies; more “frivolous filing” overreach from the IRS; and increased use of IRS enforcement tactics isn’t leading to increased tax revenue
Many Thanks — to the generous donors who keep NWTRCC in business
Criminal Cases and Fear — Karl Meyer writes from the standpoint of decades of experience with war tax resistance about what factors increase the likelihood of criminal prosecution for war tax resistance. Larry Dansinger and Ruth Benn add two cents apiece.
War Tax Resisters in History — Ed Hedemann reviews some of his research into the U.S. government’s use of property seizures and criminal cases as tools against war tax resisters in the post-World War Ⅱ era
Resources — notes on the Death & Taxes DVD, the new “Thoreau and His Heirs: The History and the Legacy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience” study kit, and the NWTRCC fundraising scarves
NWTRCC News — a note on the upcoming national conference in Boston next month
A Portlander protests America’s wars one small IRS check at a time.
Evan Reeves says people don’t know how to protest anymore, and that the city
he loves disappoints him in particular.
“There is such a large group of young, creative people here,” says the
27-year-old Southwest Portlander. “And I think we can exploit that and take
advantage of it and really put Portland on the radar.”
Reeves — whose left arm features a tattoo of a distorted, industrialized
U.S. flag that he
describes as “almost anti-American” — is fed up with the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. That’s why he didn’t pay his 2009 federal income taxes.
But when Reeves began racking up massive fees that now total more than
$5,500, he decided it would only be a matter of time before the Internal
Revenue Service seized his bank accounts or garnished his paychecks.
So in , he decided to repay the money
in what he calls “the most difficult way possible.” Earlier
, he sent the
IRS
5,574 checks, one for each
U.S. service
member who had died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to that point. It
proved more difficult than he had imagined. “Probably more so for myself than
the
IRS,”
says Reeves.
The Facebook application designer and amateur photographer says he wrote each
check for 96 cents.
The checks and mailing process cost him between $400 and $500. He threw a
“check-signing party” with some friends to enlist their help in filling in
each memo box with the name of a soldier who had died.
“It felt really fun, and really awful at the same time,” says Pam Allee, a
67-year-old longtime tax protester living in North Portland who attended the
party. “We understood that these were people and not just letters on a page.”
Allee got to know Reeves through their involvement in anti-war websites. She
laments that tax protesters often back down under pressure from the
IRS and
never try again. She fears that without support, Reeves might do the same.
Richard Panick, the
IRS’s
spokesman, couldn’t comment whether the
IRS
will accept an individual’s payment. But he was surprised by Reeves’ method.
“This is something I have not experienced,” Panick says.
Reeves says he plans to take more stands against the
IRS. He
just doesn’t know how. He would like to find a way to raise more public
awareness next time for his defiance, maybe with a Last Thursday event.
Ellie Brown, a friend who graduated with Reeves from the University of
Michigan and moved west with him in , says
Reeves’ unique, passionate protest comes from the same place as his
photography.
Reeves, who moved to Portland to lead a car-free, bike-happy lifestyle, has
always been creative, the type of person who can always find something fun to
do on a Saturday night. Once, he and Brown drove around pilfering plastic
boxes and twist ties from a Kroger grocery store to build a robot on their
front lawn that towered above their roof.
“The neighbors already hated us because we didn’t mow our lawn,” says Brown.
“He had a name, but I can’t remember it.”
“Styrone,” Reeves says with a smile. “They [the boxes] are made out of some
chemical compound, polystyrene…. We wanted to give him a human quality.”
Reeves is not the first creative tax protester. Allee knows of people who
have paid their bills to the
IRS
in quarters.
On , Reeves
left on a three-month trip to Thailand with his partner, Katie Langdon. He
insists he isn’t hiding from the
IRS,
which should know how to find him by the time he returns.
“I think he’s being pretty brave. He’s putting a lot on the line,” says
Brown. “Not many people talk [back to] the
IRS.”
Reeves also tells the story on his blog, along with a photo of the thousands of checks, and a scan of the letter he sent along with them.
Tax resisters, as well as people just disgruntled or disgusted with their taxes, will frequently stumble on the passive-aggressive tactic of paying their taxes, but in a way that is particularly inconvenient for the tax collector.
Some times also, they will choose a mode of payment that is both unusual and that has some symbolic or propaganda value.
Today I’ll mention some examples of these techniques.
Evan Reeves wrote out 5,574 separate checks for $0.96 each to pay his federal income taxes.
On each check, in the “memo” field, he wrote the name of a U.S. soldier who died in the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.
He enlisted like-minded friends to help him fill in the checks.
Homeless artist John Ed Croft tried to use aluminum cans, “the currency of the homeless,” to pay his income tax in .
A fellow who thought he did not deserve his $137 traffic fine paid it by folding 137 dollar bills into origami pigs and arranging them in a pair of Dunkin’ Donut boxes to turn them in at the police department.
One of 137 dollar bills folded into origami pigs that a man used to pay his traffic fine.
Many people have hit on the idea of paying their taxes using the lowest denomination legal currency available.
Here are some examples from recent years:
Richard Ross paid his $4,079 property tax bill by lugging eleven sacks of loose change to the county treasurer.
Normand Czepial paid his Quebec property taxes with 213,625 pennies submitted in an inflatable children’s swimming pool (alas, Canadian law allows anyone to refuse to accept more than twenty-five pennies in a single transaction).
Tax resisters in Bilbao paid part of their fine with 20,000 pennies.
Ron Spears paid a past-due property tax bill with 33,000 pennies, carried into the county treasurer’s office “in buckets on a hand truck.”
War tax resister Cynthia Sharpe prepares to pay her taxes with a check written on a giant mock-up of a coffin lid.
Australian war tax resister Robert Burrowes has tried to pay his taxes in a number of odd ways:
with a truckload of “Aboriginal land”
with medical supplies
with 104 trees
with 94 shovels
It is all well and good to consider the impressive variety of tactics that historical tax resistance movements have used to supplement their campaigns, but how do you go about choosing the right set of tactics that will do the most good for your campaign in the here-and-now?
This has lately been a frequent topic of discussion in American war tax resistance circles.
Some American war tax resisters have been pushing to convert us from being a coalition of people with a common interest in war tax resistance into an actual movement that has precise goals, particular tactics designed to meet the goals, metrics to measure success, and so forth.
(If you’d like to review some of the back-and-forth on this topic, take a look for example at The Picket Line entries for , , and , Larry Rosenwald’s War Tax Resistance Manifesto, and some of the wtr-s email list threads starting in .)
So far, these efforts have floundered in their attempts to move from this sensible-sounding idea towards an implementation that actually defines which goals and which tactics and which criteria we’re all supposed to unite behind.
Why might this be so?
Why has it proven difficult for a group of people with such a specific and unusual preoccupation as war tax resistance to make headway towards agreeing on something seemingly so basic as which goals they are pursuing?
There are several varieties of war tax resister
It turns out that there are distinct varieties of war tax resisters, and that while unsurprisingly they have a shared interest in the nitty-gritty of tax resistance and a shared dislike for militarism, when it comes to motives, goals, and tactics these varieties are in important ways very different.
There are four varieties of tax resister:
conscientious objection
A tax resister who is motivated by conscientious objection wants his or
her conscience to be free of the stain of complicity with what the government does with the tax money.
Such a resister doesn’t necessarily care if the government knows about his or her resistance, and doesn’t necessarily feel like he or she needs to be part of a movement — resisting taxes is the right thing to do, resisters like this feel, and they’d do it even if they were alone.
civil disobedience
A tax resister who is using tax resistance as a form of civil-disobedient
protest is trying to amplify the effect of his or her protest by breaking the law, publicly, and inviting the legal consequences.
It is a way of communicating the strength of the resister’s objections, and his or her willingness to sacrifice for these beliefs.
If the government responds by seizing the tax money, that doesn’t necessarily represent a defeat, since the tax resistance is more about taking a principled oppositional stand than about the actual money involved.
nonviolent conflict
A resister who hopes to use tax resistance to reduce the resources
available to the government and thereby force it to change its behavior (or perhaps even to replace it or force it to relinquish control), is using tax resistance as a form of nonviolent conflict.
Such a resister needs lots of comrades to join in the struggle, and prefers tactics that cost the government the most.
legal test-case
Some tax resisters resist because they conclude that the tax they are
resisting was enacted illegally, or is imposed by an institution without the proper authority to do so, or that it is being illegally applied to them.
They resist in anticipation of such a legal theory being found to be correct, and for the tax to be legally abolished.
In the war tax resistance movement you find this in resisters who argue that the Nuremberg Principles say taxpayers are legally obligated to avoid paying for aggressive war and war crimes, or that the option of conscientious objection to military taxation is a human right.
Many other tax resistance movements do not have the same variety
These varieties are not unique to war tax resistance.
They are found in all of the tax resistance campaigns I have studied.
But most of those campaigns have been dominated by a single variety, and so it has been much easier — almost second-nature — for them to decide on their goals.
For example, Quaker war tax resisters in the early years of the United States were almost exclusively motivated by conscientious objection.
Their goal was to have a conscience clean of involvement in shedding the blood of others, and they developed techniques that satisfied this goal.
Tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain wanted to demonstrate the self-serving hypocrisy of a male-exclusive government that treated women as people when it came time to tax them, but as non-people when it came time to ask for the consent of the governed.
These resisters courted arrest and property seizure and used such events as opportunities for protest.
They are classic civil-disobedient protesters, and their tactics reflect this.
Tax resisters in the movement pressing for the Reform Act of wanted to “stop the supplies” — that is, withhold enough money from the government that it would be crippled and would be forced to grant the movement’s demands.
This is why they augmented their tax strike with a run on the Bank of England.
They were using tax resistance as part of a campaign of nonviolent conflict meant to force political change.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago refused to pay while they pursued a legal challenge to property assessments that had left many wealthy and well-connected property owners exempt.
(They won their case, which found the assessments — and therefore the taxes based on them — to be invalid.)
The challenge for American war tax resisters is that their “movement” is not any one of these things, but is an unstable amalgam of elements of all four.
Some resisters are conscientious objectors, some are civil disobedients, some are nonviolent resistants, some hope to legalize war tax refusal, and some straddle two or more of these varieties.
Because of this, there is little agreement to be had once you get past the tactic of tax resistance itself.
This could change.
If the number of war tax resisters were to grow much larger for some reason — for instance because of an unpopular war, a religious revival that emphasizes pacifism, or a revolt against government spending that highlights Pentagon profligacy — perhaps the swelling of the movement would make one variety or another overwhelmingly predominate, and such a movement could more easily unite behind particular goals and tactics.
Another possibility is that a subset of current American war tax resisters who are united by all being of one variety decides to unite on their own behind a particular campaign with goals and tactics that are appropriate to them.
If they have success with their approach, they may find that some of the resisters who currently find homes in the other varieties will come to find that approach more to their liking, or will find ways to make it compatible with their own.
These varieties are not entirely distinct
You may notice that the varieties I listed are not entirely distinct.
For example, some of the women in the Women’s Tax Resistance League pursued legal challenges that made them seem very much like people in the legal test-case category.
Some of the property tax resisters in Chicago were also motivated by a civil-disobedient protest against corrupt and big-spending government.
It is possible for a war tax resister to belong to two, three, maybe even all four categories simultaneously.
And many of us in the war tax resistance movement are motivated by more than one of these categories of resistance, or may find ourselves migrating from variety to variety over time as our motivations change.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.
You cannot just haphazardly mix-and-match motives, goals, and tactics and expect to come up with something that makes sense (unfortunately, I sometimes see war tax resisters try).
Consider these examples:
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
In the first example, the resister talks about his or her motives (“I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government”) sounding like someone motivated by conscientious objection, but chooses tactics (“I am very public… I am willing to risk government retribution by [being] more disruptive to the state”) that sound like they spring from civil disobedience as protest, and has a goal (“we will rise up to reorganize society”) that involves ambitions of using tax resistance as nonviolent force to cause governmental change.
And that’s fine. None of this is contradictory or incompatible.
You can be motivated by conscientious objection and decide to use tactics of civil disobedience to pursue a campaign of nonviolent resistance.
But the second example is more problematic.
The resister again sounds like he or she is motivated by conscientious objection (“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way”) but the tactic chosen, to withhold and redirect a symbolic portion from the tax bill, is incompatible with the motive.
Someone whose conscience will not allow them to contribute to killing in any way, if that person considers their taxes such a contribution, will be just as unwilling to pay the second €84 as the first €84, and of course each € after that.
Furthermore, this resister’s goal — to make the military have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy a tank — is also not compatible with that symbolic tactic.
So a resister like this is incoherent and confused, and is therefore less effective and less persuasive.
Different varieties of resister evaluate tactics differently
Evan Reeves with his 5,574 checks
Remember Evan Reeves?
He’s an American war tax resister who decided to protest the connection between taxes and war by paying his taxes, but in a unique way: he wrote 5,574 checks, each one for ⅟5,574th of his tax bill (about 96¢), and each one bearing the name of a different war victim in the “memo” field.
This was an innovative, creative, interesting tactic — but if you try to imagine how it appears from the vantage point of war tax resisters in each of the varieties I described, you’ll get some idea of how difficult it can be to pick a tactic that pleases everybody.
Here is one way I have imagined four resisters evaluating Reeves’s tactic:
“That wouldn’t work for me. If I pay my taxes, in any form, I help to pay for war. If I did this, at the same time I was expressing sympathy for 5,574 war victims, I’d be paying for their victimization.”
“That’s a great way of making the connection between taxes and the victims of war, and it’s very media-savvy as well. Not only that, but you may get some people at the tax office to scratch their heads and put two and two together. The only thing that would be better is if it were illegal, so that it put you in clear opposition to the government.”
“How much does it cost the government to process a check? If it’s more than 96¢ you may have struck upon a way for people to withhold resources from the government without risking legal sanction. It’s worth investigating further.”
“I don’t get it. How does this get us any closer to legalizing conscientious objection to military taxation? The whole point is that you shouldn’t have to pay those taxes in the first place.”
There’s also a fundamental ideological divide at work
Another thing that can make it difficult for American war tax resisters to agree on tactics and goals is that there is a fundamental disagreement among these resisters about whether the U.S. government is salvageable.
Many American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for good that ought to be preserved and strengthened, and that its militarism is a flaw that for the time being and in some contexts necessarily puts conscientious people in opposition to it.
Our goal, such resisters believe, is to reform the government by removing this flaw so that it can do the good work it ought to be doing without tangling us in its bloody errors.
Many other American war tax resisters believe that their government is, by and large, a force for evil — an irredeemable tool of militarism whose primary function is violence.
They believe that conscientious people like themselves ought to be wholly in opposition to it, should withdraw allegiance from it, and hope to replace it with something else entirely.
I see this divide come into play frequently among American war tax resisters.
It makes a big difference when evaluating tactics because resisters in one camp will ask “but how does this weaken the government?” while resisters in the other camp will ask “but how can we do this without weakening the government (or seeming to ally ourselves with enemies of the government)?” and immediately they’re at loggerheads.
There are war tax resisters who can say, almost in the same breath, that people ought to refuse to pay their taxes because so much of the federal budget is for war, and that corporations ought to pay more taxes because they have a responsibility to help pay for government programs. At first this didn’t make any sense to me at all, but then I came to realize that if you believe that government is essentially good, though terribly flawed, and if you are a tax resister as a mode of civil-disobedient protest, it’s not contradictory to want to resist taxes yourself (to amplify your protest) while hoping that corporations pay more taxes (so the on-the-whole benevolent government can accomplish more) — misguided, perhaps, but not contradictory.
In conclusion…
Anyway, I bring all this up in part because I think it helps to explain why some of the arguments that occupy the modern American war tax resistance movement never seem to go anywhere, but also in part because I want to prepare people who read about my catalog of tax resistance tactics.
It is very unlikely that all of the tactics on the list will appeal to you.
Some of the tactics will seem to you to be bizarre, counterproductive, or irrelevant to the sort of campaign you are hoping for.
This is because tax resistance is a tactic that belongs to movements of many sorts, with many motivations, and many goals.
Which tactics will best harmonize with tax resistance will depend on the variety of tax resistance campaign they are part of.
Today, an international tax resistance news round-up:
Hong Kong
The “Occupy Central” movement, which has been pushing for political liberalization in Hong Kong, is exploring the tactic of tax resistance.
Inspired by American war tax protester Evan Reeves, who paid his taxes in protest by writing 5,574 checks, each with a name of a fallen U.S. soldier written in the memo field, Raymond Kwong launched a similar protest against the Hong Kong government.
On , Kwong sent off the last of his 9,280 checks.
He used rubber-stamps, some hand-carved, to fill out each check, and hand-signed each one.
He says he felt like something out of the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times while going through all the motions of stamping and signing each check, a process that took about 54 hours.
Between the cost of the checks, the postage, the stamps & ink, he also says he had to spend about HK$500 above and beyond the amount of the tax.
these stacks contain about half of Raymond Kwong’s 9,280 tax checks
The New Statesman looks back on the life of women’s suffrage activist Sophia Duleep Singh:
She was one of the early tax resisters, refusing to pay for licences for her dogs and carriage.
She ignored all letters demanding payment until she was issued with a fine.
Instead, she equipped her lawyer with a disquisition on female suffrage and the injustice of taxation without representation and sent him to court to read it to the judge.
Eventually bailiffs turned up at her house and seized a seven-stone diamond ring, worth far more than she owed.
But the suffragettes won the war: when the ring came up at auction, they flooded the auction house and refused to bid for it until the auctioneer was forced to lower the starting bid to £10 — at which price it was bought by a suffragette and returned to Sophia, amid rapturous applause.
Today I’ll try to catch up on what has been going on with the tax resistance campaign taking place in Hong Kong as part of the “umbrella movement” protests for democratic reforms.
Beijing loyalists had been pushing what they were calling a “universal suffrage” bill, but one which would only allow people to vote for candidates that had been pre-screened by a Beijing-controlled committee.
This bill failed to pass the Hong Kong legislature , which was seen as a victory for pro-democratic forces.
The tax resistance campaign has posted a series of bulletins on inmediahk.net about the campaign and its historical precedents, including:
some of the illustrations accompanying the inmediahk.net series of articles about the tax resistance campaign in Hong Kong
The movement seems to be exploring new tactics.
The last time I checked in, the tactics being discussed seemed to mostly be either underpaying tax by a symbolic amount or paying the complete amount of the tax but in a symbolic fashion (by writing a large number of checks each for a value that is a number with symbolic value for the campaign).
Overpaying the taxes by a symbolic amount so that the government cuts a refund check for that amount.
some of the refund checks received from Hong Kong Inland Revenue
Expanding the underpayment or payment-with-many-checks method to other payments to the government besides taxes, such as student loan repayments, rates at government-run housing, and utility bills.
people brought their checkbooks to an event where they could use rubber stamps to quickly make many $6.89 checks
Donating money to charity so as to reduce the amount of tax owed.
Responding to a notice of assessment with an objection (in the 1cm×18cm space provided for objections) to the effect that the unrepresentative, violent Leung Chun-ying regime has no authority to assess taxes.
fine print fills the space allowed for objections to the tax assessment
“I resist taxes because I’m unwilling to be complicit in the belligerence of the government. I hope to convince many people to take this stand, and so I am very public about it. I am willing to risk government retribution by doing things that make my resistance more disruptive to the state. I hope that if enough people join me, we will rise up to reorganize society in a less violent way.”
“My conscience will not allow me to contribute to killing in any way, so I withhold €84 from my income tax bill and give it instead directly to the Ministry of Education. If enough of us do this, maybe one day the schools will have all the money they need, and the army will have to hold a bake sale if it wants to buy another tank.”
