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a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
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Tax Day actions →
2022
Robert McGee has conducted or supervised many surveys about the ethics of tax evasion in countries around the world.
He has now summarized several of those studies along with a bibliography of additional cross-cultural tax evasion attitude research.
What was sometimes billed as the “Confessions of a Failed Tax Resister” (Rebecca Gordon) did the rounds around Tax Day in the United States this year.
Gordon was a war tax resister in the 1980s but eventually threw in the towel, paying her taxes, penalties, and interest, and returning to being a compliant taxpayer.
“It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.”
Meanwhile, Owen Silverman at the University of Connecticut’s student paper put in a plug for conscientious tax resistance, though it sounds like he thinks we should wait for the government to legalize it first or something.
ProPublica has been continuing to do exposés about how the tax system is rigged in favor of the rich at the expense of the little guy.
One of the latest is “If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker” which is specifically about how wage-earners get the shaft.
Peter J. Reilly looks at the comparative woes of the 1099 granfaloon and finds them not too bad all things considered.
The tax filing deadline came and went in the United States.
Now that fewer people are filing last-minute paper returns, this is less of a spectacle than it once was, but war tax resisters still like to mark the occasion as a sort of ceremonial holiday.
For example, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Taxes for Peace group redirected taxes from the government to useful groups.
The People’s Life Fund in California also redirected $61,000 of would-be tax dollars to better causes.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued yet another report.
According to them, the IRS still had about four and a half million unprocessed paper tax returns to get through as of , only a couple hundred thousand less than they started the year with, while meanwhile half a million new returns had come in and hadn’t been processed.
The agency had a goal of hiring 5,473 new submission processing employees to cope with this, but as of , they’d managed to onboard only 521.
The American Prospect published an editorial by Robert Kuttner recommending that Democrats respond with mass tax refusal to the next presidential election if it is won by fraud by the Republican candidate.
Taxpayers owed considerably more money than usual when they filed their income taxes this year — hundreds of billions more.
And this is contributing to a record amount of income tax collection — both in terms of the raw amount, and in terms of the percent of GDP.
This is probably because of a surge in capital gains last year (from which taxes are not withheld over the course of the year) but may be also because much of the recent increases in wealth have gone to people in higher tax brackets.
This increase in the amount owed may cause a little extra “sticker shock” among affected taxpayers.
On the other hand, refunds were also higher than usual this year, so I suppose it could even-out, attitudes-wise.
Spanish war tax resisters have been ramping up their activity as the Ukraine war prompts ever more military spending in Europe.
In the Basque Country, for example, activists have set up offices of war tax resistance in Donostia, Gasteiz, and Bilbao to help people through the process of resistance and redirection.
Ruth Benn of NWTRCC shared her story of trying to access her IRS account on-line.
The IRS is trying to let taxpayers access their information on-line so that the agency can take some pressure off their grievously swamped phone service lines.
They’re also extra-sensitive to security issues, both because taxpayer account information can be private and sensitive, and because international fraudsters use such information to siphon money from the U.S. treasury.
But at the same time, the steps they take to tighten security are frustrating and user-hostile (as Benn found), and raise the hackles of privacy advocates.
This has put them in a tight spot, and the solutions they’ve come up with don’t seem to be solving their problem while at the same time they’re causing frustration for everyone involved.