How you can resist funding the government →
other ways the government is funded →
excise taxes →
tobacco tax
I’m hunting for ideas for people who want to make up for the money I’m not paying into the government treasury. Use the email link off to the left to send me your ideas.
Ways you can support the federal government
Have a smoke!: For every pack of cigarettes you buy, the manufacturer will donate 39 cents to the federal government — this is above and beyond the tax you paid on the income to buy the ciggies, the payroll taxes paid by the tobacco industry, state taxes, and payoffs to various lawsuit-happy attorneys general!
Pay at the pump!: For every gallon you put in your car, the feds get another 18-and-a-half cents to spend.
(Again, above and beyond…)
Earn Income!: For every six or seven dollars you earn (on average), you’ll give one of those dollars to be spent by the U.S. Congress.
Raise that mug!: At the bottom of every pint of beer is a federal excise tax nickel.
The feds get 21 to 67 cents for your bottle of wine. Finish off that bottle of hard liquor and your Senator has another $2.14 to argue over.
Enjoy Burning Man!: Half the price of your ticket goes straight to the federal Bureau of Land Management — what they don’t use to buy night-vision goggles and bong-seeking-missiles for use on the playa they get to keep as profit.
Go shooting!: A sweet 10–11% of the cost of your firearm, and your shells and cartridges go to help Congress figure out new ways to interfere with your right to bear arms.
(As always, above and beyond…)
Other federal excise taxes apply to cars and car parts, tires, coal, fishing equipment, vaccines, phone service, air travel, water travel, heavy vehicles and probably a bunch of other things.
Can you help me with my list?
Today, some bits-and-pieces that have collected over the past weeks that I haven’t been able to fit in anywhere else:
A site calling itself The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree brings the war tax resister “penny poll” into the digital age: asking people to fill a shopping cart with things they’d rather have bought than the Iraq War for that $3,000,000,000,000.
The Tax Foundation notes that while we’re distracted complaining about the windfall profits of ExxonMobil and the like, the real bandits are getting off skot free: “the total amount of taxes the company paid or remitted [last quarter was] $29.3 billion, nearly three times the net profits it earned for shareholders. The financial statements of two other large U.S.-based oil companies, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco, show similar large tax payments. Indeed, these three companies paid or remitted a combined $47.8 billion in taxes in the first quarter of , nearly $28 billion more than they earned in net profits.”
Mimi Copp says that the Iraq War has cost American families about $16,500 each. But she’s decided to stop payment. “It is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But this year, with a core group of people in my church community, Circle of Hope, I was able to walk with them through the discernment process and I felt quite strongly about doing this form of resistance to war-making, while at the same time redirecting money to life-giving initiatives. Here’s a letter to the editor I wrote for tax day, which was not published.”:
How can we stop the war in Iraq? Soldiers can refuse to fight. Government
leaders can de-fund the occupation. Taxpayers can stop paying for it.
This year I will not pay my federal income tax to the
U.S. government.
I will no longer support my country’s war-making by giving it my money.
In , out of every dollar the
U.S. government
spent, 5 cents was spent on education and 12 cents on food and housing
assistance, while it spent 41 cents on war & preparations for war. This
type of spending does not reflect my Christian values and therefore I will
not support it.
Instead, I will redirect my tax dollars to two organizations working on
life-giving initiatives: healthcare for the uninsured and aid for Iraqi
refugees.
When Congress passes the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill
(HR-1921), I
will resume paying my income tax to the
U.S. government.
I know that I will be breaking the law and I am prepared to accept the
consequences, because when a country wages war there are consequences; ask a
solider returning home or an Iraqi refugee being resettled in Philadelphia.
The MakingPeace blog reports on another variation of the “penny poll”-style war tax protest. It’s pretty simple: just pieces of paper on which are printed “I’d rather buy _______ than war!”, accompanied with magic markers aplenty.
Everybody in the willfully ineffective wing of the American anti-war movement is going to Cleveland for an Open National Conference to Stop the War in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now. They seem to have concluded, before the conference even begins, that the most important thing they can be doing right now is to organize another big march and rally like the ones that have been so effective in the past.
The Urban Institute has published a paper on War and Taxes to note that the Iraq War seems to be an anomaly in that the U.S. government is spending hand over fist on the war, but not trying to raise revenue accordingly.
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.
As I mentioned
, I have been working on a series of pages, originally intended
to supplement
NWTRCC’s website or literature,
on the subject of “Where Else Does the Government Get Money to Make War, and
What Can We Do About It?” (Where else other than the personal income tax,
that is.)
Unfortunately, it seems that the defenders of the
NWTRCC faith are not happy with the direction this project
has taken so far, fearing that it would distract from the orthodox war tax
resistance message the group has already established, or something like that.
So I’ve dropped the project, and will just go ahead and publish the pages I’ve
assembled so far here instead. Here’s the first, along with some introductory
material:
Sources of Federal Revenue in a Typical Year
The United States government gets the majority of its revenue for conducting
wars from two sources: the personal income tax and social insurance taxes
(the “payroll” tax that ostensibly funds such programs as Social Security and
Medicare). In addition, the government usually borrows a great deal of money
to cover expenses that exceed its revenues. Another large source of revenue is
the corporate income tax. A number of other taxes and fees and other sources
of income make up the rest.
The receipts from some taxes and fees go into the federal government’s
“general fund” from which it pays for most of its budget items, including most
military spending. Receipts from other taxes and fees go into specific trust
funds. For example, there is a tax on fuel that goes into the “Leaking
Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund” that is used to fund the agency that
oversees the cleanup of sites where fuel has seeped into the ground from
leaking underground fuel storage tanks.
Some war tax resisters only want to resist taxes that go into the general fund
but do not mind paying taxes that are at least nominally destined for such
non-military-related trust funds.
However, Congress has a history of “borrowing” from trust funds to pay for
general fund spending (including military spending). For example, it borrowed
heavily from money paid into Social Security when more money was being
collected by the payroll tax than was being paid out in Social Security
benefits. Now that benefits paid are starting to exceed payroll tax receipts,
Congress is balking at paying back this borrowed money and is instead talking
of a Social Security “crisis” that will necessitate raising taxes or cutting
benefits. What this amounts to is that all along, Congress treated the payroll
tax as if it were money in the general fund that it could spend on war.
For this, and other reasons, some war tax resisters want to resist even those
taxes that are ostensibly levied for non-military purposes.
The Excise Tax on Tobacco
Description
Every time someone buys a pack of cigarettes, they pay $1.01 in federal excise
tax, and an average of $1.20 in state taxes (different states have different
tobacco excise tax rates). Other tobacco products are also taxed.
Amount of the Tax
The federal excise tax on tobacco products rose sharply in
, and has risen 321% since
. As of ,
the federal tax rates on tobacco products are:
Product
Tax rate
small cigarettes
$59.33 per thousand
large cigarettes
$105.69 per thousand
small cigars
$59.33 per thousand
large cigars
52.75% of sale price (or $0.4026 per cigar, whichever is less)
chewing tobacco
$0.5033 per pound
snuff
$1.51 per pound
pipe tobacco
$2.8311 per pound
roll-your-own tobacco, blunt wrappers
$24.78 per pound
rolling papers
$0.0315 per fifty
cigarette tubes
$0.0630 per fifty
In addition, every premises at which tobacco product manufacturing takes place
is required to pay $1,000 per year in federal tax (some smaller manufacturers
may pay a $500 tax instead).
How Much the Government Collects
In , the federal
government reported collecting over $950 million in tobacco-related excise
taxes.
How This Tax Is Collected
The manufacturer or importer of the tobacco product is liable for the federal
tax. Tobacco products may be transferred from one licensed manufacturer or
importer to another without tax being paid, but the final such entity who
sells the product on its way to the end-consumer must pay the tax.
Are the Tax Receipts Earmarked?
These taxes go into the federal government’s general fund.
How Can You Resist This Tax?
Obviously, you can avoid contributing to tobacco taxes by not purchasing,
manufacturing, selling, or using tobacco products.
In cases where the tax on tobacco products is considerably different in
neighboring jurisdictions, some people evade the higher of the taxes by
smuggling tobacco products from the low-tax jurisdiction to the higher-tax one
and then selling (or using) the products there.
One can support the tax resistance of others by participating in the
production and distribution of counterfeit tax stamps (such as are attached
to cigarette packaging to indicate that the tax has been paid).
Another option is to “grow your own.”
The process of growing and curing tobacco is complex but not completely out of reach of the small-scale producer.
Don Carey of Freedom Township, Ohio, responded to a 2,153% increase in the excise taxes on roll-your-own tobacco by doing just that (see: “Smoker decides to grow his own tobacco” Ohio Beacon ).
See Also
Lovenheim, Michael F. “How Far to the Border?: The Extent and Impact of
Cross-Border Casual Cigarette Smuggling” 61 National Tax
Journal 7–33 ()
The IRS says that it’s implementing new processes that ease up on the liens it files against people who haven’t paid their federal taxes.
This includes raising the tax-debt threshold at which the agency decides to file a lien, making it easier for newly-recompliant taxpayers to have their liens lifted, and making it easier to enter into installment agreements and “offers in compromise.”
This was partially in response to complaints from the Taxpayer Advocate’s office about the agency’s heavy-handed and counterproductive enforcement methods.
The War Resisters League has revised their popular “pie chart” graph that purports to show the destiny of the federal discretionary budget and thereby the destiny of your federal income tax dollar. This year, because Obama’s budget called for a reduction in the payroll tax rate with the missing money to come explicitly out of that raised by the income tax in the general fund, the chart’s conceit of keeping trust funds and the taxes ostensibly destined for them separate from the rest of the accounts is even more awkward than usual. Still, the fliers make for good conversation-starters.
The number of people who expatriated from the United States and renounced their U.S. citizenship jumped , more than doubling the number in .
Every year, on tax day, Steve Magin comes into town and visits the IRS offices, offering to pay his taxes in full if they’ll assure him that none of the money will go to pay for war and armaments.
The agency representatives, of course, offer no such assurances, and so Magin keeps his checkbook in his pocket and sends the tax money to charity instead.
Here’s some more about Steve and his protest.
Another “suspicious powder” incident shuts down the IRS office in Ogden, Utah.
The powder turned out to be nontoxic, but kept the building shut down for a long time during the Hazmat team and FBI crime scene investigation.
I’m sure nobody saw this coming: as states have been piling cigarette taxes higher and higher, tobacco smuggling has skyrocketed — to the point where about half of the smokers in Arizona and New York are smoking cigarettes smuggled in from elsewhere.
The smuggling trade has naturally proven a boon to the underground economy and to the organized crime groups who try to monopolize it.
Today, a couple of notes about tax resistance against the war taxes instituted by the various nationalist factions of the civil war in China in 1927.
First, a dispatch sent on from Shanghai, as carried in the Adelaide Register:
…The first efforts of Nationalist officials to collect the new 50 per cent.
tax on tobacco , in contravention of
the treaties, were frustrated by the merchants who refused to pay. The
officials took up positions outside the customs releasing depots and refused
deliveries except upon payment of the new impost. Importers complained to
their respective Chambers of Commerce and at a combined meeting it was
decided to write to the senior Consul (United States) and to request the
consular body to meet a deputation of merchants who are preparing a list of
questions to present to the consular body, and they declare that they are
determined not to pay, explaining their action by stating that the
Nationalists frankly admit that the increase is necessary to continue the
campaign against the North. The merchants refuse to finance the Chinese
military campaign and thus prolong the civil war, apart from the contention
that the tax is illegal, according to the findings of recent tariff
conference. The tobacco tax is but one instance of a wholesale imposition of
taxes, amounting to an attempt to enforce tariff autonomy in order to raise
military funds as quickly as possible at the expense of trade. Such a
programme as carried out by the Hankow Government has reduced Hankow to a
condition of industrial idleness and, paralyzed the entire trade of Central
China.
Next, this Shanghai dispatch from , as carried in the Launceston (Tasmania)
Examiner:
On Nationalist surtaxes on
practically all imports to China will be enforced. British commerce is
seriously threatened, and the proposals are being strongly opposed. It is
understood that the Government has instructed merchant bodies, through their
Consuls, to refuse payment.
The diplomatic body at Peking is handling the matter, and it is believed
that, failing the co-operation of the Japanese and the Americans, resistance
will take the form of independent action to protect British trade. It is
understood that British vessels will be instructed that only at British
wharves can they land goods without the payment of the illegal taxes, and
that interference by the Chinese will be forcibly resisted.
The increase in some instances amounts to 57 per cent., and the lowest tax is
15 per cent. The increased tonnage dues of 50 per cent. have not been paid by
foreign companies, a policy of defiance being followed.
Over the course of the following months, the nationalists would flat-out
appropriate much of what had been acquired by foreign imperialists, including
the British, so this didn’t work out too well for the resisters.
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
Kennett Love
In , the Washington Monthly carried a story about war tax resisters written by Kennett Love, himself a signer of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge.
“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all the people, not just to those of draft age,” says a pamphlet now being sent out across the country from a littered, poster-bright office on New York’s Lower East Side.
It carries a radical call to the citizenry to come out against the war in Vietnam by refusing to pay taxes that finance the war.
Such tax resistance is now gathering adherents outside traditional pacifist circles.
Although it is still far from a major headache to the government, Internal Revenue Service men are being assigned to locate bank accounts of resisters and to seize the sums due — plus six per cent interest.
Out of the frustration of the anti-Vietnam-war segment of the population, which is growing rapidly according to the polls; out of dashed hopes raised by peace promises and peace gestures from the Nixon and Johnson Administrations alike; and out of a feeling that orthodox democratic forms of protest — elections and demonstrations — have been ignored, an increasing number of otherwise law-abiding people are following their consciences into what Gandhi called the last stage of civil disobedience by openly refusing to pay part or all of their federal taxes.
The chief targets of the tax-resistance movement are the income tax, particularly the 10 per cent war surtax imposed last year, and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service.
Other federal taxes have been rejected either as too complicated to resist, such as the liquor tax, which is collected at the wholesale level before individual purchase, or as earmarked for such non-war uses as highway construction.
One pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.
The telephone tax is the most popular one to resist, partly because it was the first to be specifically linked to the war in Vietnam and partly because the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has proven courteous in its handling of tax resisters.
The telephone tax was due to be reduced to three per cent in .
In approving the White House request for its extension of the 10 per cent level, Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) of the House Ways and Means Committee said: “It is clear that the Vietnam and only the Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”
Resistance to the telephone tax began soon afterward.
Karl Meyer of Chicago, a former Congressman’s son and a free-lance writer immersed in pacifist causes, conceived the idea and proposed it to Maris Cakars of the War Resisters League in New York.
Meyer drafted a pamphlet, “Hang Up On War!,” which has become a staple among the literature distributed by the War Resisters League through the mails and at peace booths.
It explains the link between the telephone tax and the war, summarizes moral and legal objections to the war, and provides practical advice for resisters of the tax, including a candid assessment of the possible risks.
Of the risks, it points out that under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which covers both the telephone and the income tax, one who “willfully fails to pay” could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $10,000. It adds that the experiences of tax resisters over the past several years show that the government is not willing to press criminal charges but, instead, acts to collect the taxes (with interest) directly, when and where it can.
AT&T records indicate that telephone tax resisters were relatively unmoved by President Johnson’s famous “abdication” speech on , but that about a quarter of them resumed payment of their telephone taxes at in the belief that President-elect Nixon would end the war.
A table of the telephone company statistics follows, giving the number of telephone tax refusers at the end of each quarter :
Quarter
No. of resisters to telephone tax
1,800
2,300
2,600
3,400
3,400
4,700
5,300
4,700
4,000
4,000
The figure for is not available yet, but the revived intensity of the anti-war movement, manifested in the national student moratorium on and the big demonstrations on , presage an increase.
Measured against the telephone company’s 43,459,000 residence customers, the percentage of tax resisters is minuscule.
But in view of the seriousness of the act of tax resistance, the number of resisters is a source of satisfaction and encouragement to the leaders of the movement.
A spokeswoman for the telephone company told me its standing orders are to continue service to tax resisters so long as its own charges are paid.
The company notifies the IRS of tax non-payments so it can do its own collecting.
If a tax resister informs the local business office of the telephone company that he is deliberately omitting the tax from his payment, the office will not carry the tax charges forward to his next bill.
“It would seem logical to assume that we don’t like to be a collecting agency,” she said, “but we do what we’re obliged to do.”
She said that telephone tax resisters are located mainly in college communities.
Income tax resisters, although fewer than telephone tax resisters, appear to be a more stubborn breed, unmoved by political gestures and prepared to hold out until the war actually ends.
An IRS spokesman in Washington gave me a statistical summary of the growth of such tax resistance.
So far as he knew, it first became a public issue when Joan Baez, the singer, refused in to pay 60 per cent of her income tax in an act to dissociate herself from what she called the immoral, impractical, and stupid war in Vietnam.
She refused the same proportion in and wrote the IRS: “This country has gone mad.
But I will not go mad with it.
I will not pay for organized murder.
I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.”
Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes , were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned.
Then, in , a committee under the chairmanship of the Reverend A.J. Muste circulated a tax-refusal pledge among persons on the mailing lists of the Committee for Non-Violent Action and the War Resisters League.
They obtained 370 signatures for an advertisement in The Washington Post that stated: “We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted…” Joan Baez headed the list of signers.
According to an IRS analysis, about one-quarter of the signers had no taxable income, about one-half cooperated with the IRS to the extent of telling the agent who called on them where their money could be seized, and about one-quarter put the IRS to the trouble of ferreting out their bank accounts.
The number of actual resisters came to about 275.
the IRS began keeping a count of tax protesters.
The number rose to 375. In there were 533 taxpayers who refused part or all of their income taxes and wrote the IRS that they were doing so in protest against the Vietnam war.
there were 848 who set themselves against the law on grounds of conscientious objection to the war.
The IRS spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of the income-tax protesters live on the east and west coasts and that the same proportion held for persons refusing to pay the telephone tax.
IRS
spokesmen emphasize that the number of refusers is only a tiny fraction of the total number of taxpayers.
There were some 71 million returns filed in , about 73 million in , and 75 million in .
But again, tax-resistance leaders find significance in the fact that the very idea of tax refusal was unthinkable to nearly all of the resisters until their consciences impelled them to it.
Furthermore, although the numbers are small, the rate of increase of tax resisters is far greater than the annual increase in tax returns.
Fear of prosecution and jail is a deterrent to potential tax refusers.
Many people fail to recognize the distinction between clandestine tax evasion and open tax refusal.
The IRS makes the distinction, however, and has shown no inclination to prosecute persons refusing taxes because of the Vietnam war.
An IRS spokesman said earlier this year: “Is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?”
Tax-resistance leaders believe also that the government wishes to avoid the publicity attendant on a prosecution, largely because a test case might produce a martyr and create sympathy for the movement.
The few prosecutions in recent years have been for refusal to file returns or disclose information rather than for refusal to pay.
War tax refusal in this country is older than the United States itself.
It began in when Mennonites and Quakers refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian wars.
They refused again during the American Revolution and the Civil War.
The most famous early instance was that of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in for refusing taxes in protest against our invasion of Mexico.
He explained in his essay on civil disobedience that he could not “without disgrace be associated with it” and added: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, 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.”
Gandhi, who was deeply influenced by Thoreau, wrote in that “civil non-payment of taxes is indeed the last stage in non-cooperation.
…I know that the withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.”
He went on to say: “I am equally sure that we have not yet evolved that degree of strength and discipline which are necessary… Are the Indian peasantry prepared to remain absolutely non-violent, and see their cattle taken away from them to die of hunger and thirst?
…I would urge the greatest caution before embarking upon the dangerous adventure.”
But Lord Mountbatten said with relief after India became independent: “If they had started to refuse to pay their taxes, I don’t know what we could have done.”
The idea of modern, organized tax resistance in this country against armaments and war seems to have begun with the Peacemaker Movement, which was formed by 250 pacifists who met in Chicago early in .
In , the Peacemaker Movement published the first edition of a mimeographed Handbook on Non-Payment of War Taxes, which contains practical advice and case histories.
The handbook has now run to three editions and nearly 10,000 copies.
It points out that since the bulk of the federal budget (estimates range from 66 to 80 per cent) goes to pay for past wars, finance the Vietnam war, and prepare for future wars, “it is apparent that the major business of the federal government is war… it is useless to act as if the major business of government is civil functions or peaceful pursuits.”
In , a little more than a year after A.J. Muste’s committee published its tax protest advertisement with 370 signers, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began to organize a Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, in which all the signatories pledged themselves flatly to refuse the then-proposed 10 per cent war surtax and possibly the 23 per cent of their income taxes allocated to the war effort as well.
As was the case with the Reverend Muste’s advertisement, most daily newspapers that Walker approached refused to sell space to him.
The New York Times was one that refused and so, this time, was The Washington Post.
The New York Post printed Walker’s advertisement in , as did The New York Review of Books and Ramparts.
In all, 528 writers and editors signed the pledge.
Walker told me recently that about half of them, including himself, failed to carry out the tax-refusal pledge.
“Johnson’s ‘abdication’ two weeks before the tax deadline convinced me that we had won,” he said.
I was myself among the other half of the signers who did refuse part of their taxes — 23 per cent in my case, the 10 per cent surtax not having gone into effect.
Since my own hesitant involvement in war tax resistance seems typical among the non-pacifists now joining the movement, I will summarize it here as the case history I know best.
With my part payment of my income tax, I wrote the IRS as follows:
Enclosed please find my check for $1,862.81, which is 77 per cent of the tax required.
The 23 per cent unpaid is a protest against the government’s use of that proportion of its revenue for the war in Vietnam.
My conscience revolts against the gross immorality of the war… There are also questions of law.
The war violates the supreme law of our land, notably the Constitution (Art. Ⅰ, Sec. 8, clause 11), the United Nations Charter (Art. 51), and the Southeast Asia Treaty (Art. Ⅳ)… Responsible jurists and philosophers soberly accuse our government of crimes against international codes on human rights and the conduct of wars and the specific statutes created ex post facto to punish the Nazis…
The prodigal waste of our national energy and treasure in destroying the land and people of Vietnam is so weakening this nation that other powers may bring us to judgment as we once brought the Nazis to account at Nuremburg… It will then be no defense to plead, like the “good Germans,” that we had to obey our government and cannot be held responsible for what it did.
By paying taxes which I know my government is using to kill a small nation I commit a greater and more violent breach of laws than I do by not paying…
I was a Navy pilot in World War Ⅱ.
I would not serve in this war.
If I could prevent my tax dollars from serving, I would do so.
Unfortunately, I have not yet learned of a practical way to keep the government altogether from extracting financial support from me for the war.
In the meantime, I balk at 23 per cent in token of my dissociation from the cruel injustice and bloodshed to poor and distant strangers being done under my flag, in my name, with my money.
The IRS reply did not come until after I had refused a similar amount of taxes .
It was a form postcard saying: “Dear Taxpayer: Thank you for your letter.
We are looking into the matter you brought up and should have the answer to you shortly… Thank you for your cooperation.”
The answer, inevitably, was a series of printed forms, progressing from a “notice of tax due” to a “Final Notice Before Seizure.”
The IRS had already seized telephone taxes, which I stopped paying in , from three bank accounts, patiently tracking down the bank to which I transferred my account after each seizure.
The IRS obtained the unpaid part of my tax, plus six per cent interest, in .
At this writing I am awaiting implementation of the Final Notice Before Seizure of the refused portion of my taxes.
Banks are required by law to surrender private assets, including the contents of safe deposit boxes, to the IRS upon demand.
Most banks surrender the levied amount immediately and the depositor is informed afterward.
This whole business of deliberately defying and harassing the government, even in a moral protest, is a heavy and anxious experience.
When I first considered it in I was unaware that some hundreds of other people were already doing it.
I was afraid of going to jail, which, among other things, would have prevented my fulfilling a contract to complete a book.
I began refusing the telephone tax after obtaining the pamphlet “Hang Up On War!” from a pacifist in Princeton in .
The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, which came to my attention , gave me a sufficient sense of safety in numbers to begin income-tax resistance.
I am still troubled over possible consequences, particularly after the conspiracy convictions in the Dr. Spock trial, and I find it innately distasteful to resist paying my share of the general tax burden.
But my revulsion against the war in Vietnam prevails over anxiety and civic reservations.
And the Nixon Administration seems as unwilling or as unable as the Johnson Administration to make a significant and credible effort to end the war.
In the country voted for Johnson and peace and got an escalation of the war.
In , between Nixon and Humphrey, there was no real opportunity to vote for peace.
Demonstrations have proven equally futile as a means of affecting war policy, so much so that the President declares that he will not be swayed by them.
Under these circumstances, tax resistance, distasteful as it is, seems to more and more people to offer the most effective channel of protest.
I participated in the formation of War Tax Resistance, which is working to transform tax protests from essentially individual acts into an integrated political factor.
The leading figure in the organization is Bradford Lyttle, a slim, earnest, no-nonsense pacifist who led a peace march across the United States and Europe to Moscow, urging unilateral disarmament on governments along the way and exhorting citizens toward non-cooperation with military service and war production.
Its “Call to War Tax Resistance,” claiming the right of conscientious objection for taxpayers as well as draft-age men, says:
The first goal… is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government.
Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax.
If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal.
Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.
In a separate but related action, the poet Allen Ginsberg and I have obtained the backing of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for a suit against the government to recover money that has been seized from us in enforcement of tax claims and also to enjoin further seizures.
The main ground of our action, as it is now being prepared, is based on the historical equivalency between taxes and service (which is a kind of tax) and the claim that the right of conscientious objection is as inherent to taxpayers as it is to men liable for military service.
Conscientious objectors cannot avoid service but they can earmark their service to the exclusion of warlike activity.
In the same way, we claim, taxpayers should pay their full share but they should be able to earmark their taxes to the exclusion of war-like applications.
In a time when weaponry has achieved the capacity to wipe out civilization, we believe, the people should be accorded a direct voice in deciding whether they shall make war.
Since World War Ⅱ the decision has moved ever more into the hands of the executive despite the Constitutional stipulation that it is Congress which should declare war.
Meanwhile, until we are legally able to earmark our taxes for non-warlike applications, we feel conscience-bound to resist paying at least a part of them.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
In some countries, a value added tax is a major source of government revenue, and there are periodic calls (for instance the so-called FairTax) for something similar in the U.S.
For this reason, I like to keep my eyes peeled for news about value added tax evasion and resistance strategies.
The Telegraph reports that VAT evasion “has exploded” in Great Britain in recent years.
It attributes half of this to “professional fraudsters” and half to “general non-compliance and deliberate evasion by legitimate businesses.”
Organized evaders use a technique known as “missing trader” to avoid paying this tax to the government, or, in the case of the “carousel” variety of the scheme, to double the gains by applying for tax refunds on taxes that were never paid in the first place.
All of the thunder and lightning about taxes and the “fiscal cliff” recently resulted in a major tax bill that ended up being so much about reestablishing the status quo that I’ve had little to say about it here.
The major effect on folks like me who are trying to stay below the income tax line is that our payroll and/or self-employment taxes are going back up to where they were a couple of years ago.
If you’d like to investigate further and see if there have been any tweaks to your favorite deductions or credits, take a look at the report Tax Provisions in the American Taxpayer Relief Act of from the Tax Policy Center.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy compares the reported tobacco smoking rate in various states with tobacco sales in those states, and how this comparison changes as the tobacco tax rates change in those states and in neighboring states, to estimate how tobacco taxes contribute to tobacco smuggling.
Some states, the Center says, have raised their tobacco taxes to levels that amount to a policy of “prohibition by price,” and smuggling has risen to match — New York’s huge $4.35/pack cigarette tax is matched by the Center’s estimate that fully 60.9% of the cigarettes smoked there are smuggled in from other states.
When the IRS tries to crack down on tax evasion, their gains from increased revenue from enforcement can be offset by the loss of goodwill from innocent taxpayers who get caught in the net or who have to endure more paperwork or encounters with a suspicious bureaucracy.
For a good example of how the IRS turned a loyal taxpayer into an enemy, read David Hanger’s letter It Is Not Ineptness of Incompetence, the IRS Is Stealing from You.
The government relies on voluntary taxpayer compliance much more than on IRS enforcement and threats to fill its coffers, and so stories like this may represent a big threat.
The Early Retirement Extreme blog now has a wiki that will capture in a more encyclopedic fashion the wisdom of folks who are using voluntary simplicity principles to escape the rat race in style.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
The “necessity defense”: yes, your honor, I broke the law, but I had to
do it to prevent a greater harm — American activists have tried to use it
to defend their civil disobedience against the militarist government and
its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, but rarely do the courts
even permit such an argument to be made
(activists in other countries have had
more success). But in the trial of the Transform Now Plowshares
activists in federal court ,
former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified for the defense on the subject.
The activists — Greg Boertje-Obed, Megan Rice and Michael Walli — broke
into the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant , held a Christian ceremony with a bible and candles, splashed
some human blood about, and spray-painted messages like “woe to the empire
of blood” and “the fruit of justice is peace” on the walls. The empire,
not amused, and embarrassed that an 82-year-old nun made a fool of its
nuclear weapons security, has thrown the book at them.
Ramsey Clark is an interesting case. You can’t get much more
establishment than being the United States Attorney General (under Lyndon
Johnson). At that time, he was prosecuting anti-war activists (his office
successfully prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock for conspiracy to aid and abet
draft resistance, for instance). But since then he has become an
enthusiastic critic of the American empire — even to the extent of
defending, legally and otherwise, such unsavory American enemies as
Slobodan Milošević, Lyndon Larouche, Omar Abdel-Rahman, and Saddam
Hussein.
Clark testified that the use of nuclear weapons represents an
imminent — “omnipresent” was his word — threat. The judge was skeptical:
“Excuse me,” the Judge said. “Are you saying the President intends to
use nuclear weapons? Are you in a position to know that? Are you tied
in with the President? … does the President have his finger on the
button?”
“Well,” said Clark, “he walks around with
it by his
side.”
Then there was this examination of Clark by the defense attorney:
Quigley: Is it reasonable to believe that
what is being refurbished at Y12 are weapons of mass destruction?
Clark: It’s an established fact.
Quigley: And reasonable to believe they
violate international law?
Clark: Reasonable. Under the NPT we agreed to eliminate them.
Quigley: And I believe I just heard today
or yesterday that the Boston bomber was indicted for use of a weapon of
mass destruction — that is part of our criminal code…
The Judge stepped in. “A weapon in the
hands of a terrorist or a citizen is different than a weapon in the
hands of the government. A machine gun, or a tank—is that a fair
statement?”
Clark: It’s fair if you limit it to machine
guns or rifles, but weapons of mass destruction — the
U.S. is in
violation of the intent of the most important treaty we ever signed.
Quigley: Do you believe the continuing
threat of the use of Y12 weapons constitutes a war crime?
Clark: It is a reasonable and fair
statement of belief.
Quigley: And a soldier can commit war
crimes?
Clark: Yes.
Quigley: And using, or preparing to use
weapons of mass destruction is a war crime.
Clark: That is reasonable to believe.
Quigley: The defendants believe the work at
Y12 is preparation for genocide, could be carried out by civilians or
armed services. But they believe the weapons activities at Y12 are in
preparation for genocide and a violation of international law.
Clark: That is reasonable. Because of the
magnitude of the program at this time. One sub, one sub can carry one
hundred warheads. Eight submarines, on alert at all times, eight
hundred warheads in a position to strike. Think of maps. Eight hundred
places in Europe… or on the continent of the Americas. It is criminally
insane.
Quigley: Not homicidal, but omnicidal.
Clark: The life of the planet is at risk
from this one plant here in Tennessee.
The prosecutor tried to pin Clark down: “A minute ago, you testified
that the activities at the Y12 site were unlawful. Are the people who
work there criminals?”
Clark: They are engaged in a criminal
enterprise.
It was interesting to hear of arguments like these being explicitly
aired in court. I don’t really expect the judge to address them
forthrightly and at their worth, but there is some satisfaction in
imagining His Honor trying to figure out just how he’ll sidestep the
issue.
On I mentioned the chill I felt when I noticed that two Google execs’ new book on the future of the internet had gotten glowing prepublication reviews from folks like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and a handful of other national security state celebs.
Here is an op-ed the book’s authors wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
It largely strikes a nonconfrontational freedom-is-good tyranny-is-bad tone, though I thought I saw a little saliva appear at the corners of the authors’ mouths when they wrote this:
The world’s autocrats will have to spend a great deal of money to build systems capable of monitoring and containing dissident energy.
They will need cell towers and servers, large data centers, specialized software, legions of trained personnel and reliable supplies of basic resources like electricity and Internet connectivity.
Once such an infrastructure is in place, repressive regimes then will need supercomputers to manage the glut of information.
The authors look at movements like the Arab Spring, and conclude that they petered out because their grassroots, leaderless, decentralized beginnings never matured:
“some sort of centralized authority must emerge if a democratic movement is to have any direction.”
Indeed, these grassroots, leaderless, decentralized movements constitute a threat:
a “mad consensus” that will require “a great leader” to defy, according to Henry Kissinger, whom they approvingly quote.
Over at Slate, Mya Frazier suggests that
Google has aspirations of statehood.
The internet is just such a grassroots, leaderless, decentralized
dystopia… a mad consensus in need of a great leader… and Google knows just
the company for the job.
At The New Yorker, James Surowiecki offers
a meditation on the American underground economy. “Ordinary Americans have gone underground, and, as the recovery continues to limp along, they seem to be doing it more and more.”
I’m not sure it makes much sense to spend time worrying about Obama’s
proposed budget. It’s part wish-list, part advertisement, but not policy.
But one of the things it includes is a 94% bump in the federal excise tax on cigarettes.
Every pack of cigarettes purchased would have a $1.95 federal excise tax
attached to it. While on the one hand, this would be one more reason to
quit smoking and to discourage others from taking up the habit, on the
other hand it would make tax resistance via smuggling that much more
attractive. State cigarette excise tax increases in New York, for example,
have grown to the extent that the majority of cigarettes smoked there are
smuggled in. As marijuana legalization spreads, expect the smuggling
networks that have so successfully supported the marijuana trade over the
years to find a new use in combating the cigarette tax.
The New York Times published an interesting piece on “Raising a Moral Child” that spotlights some of the current thinking on how children learn to become ethically engaged.
The summary is that it is important to praise and guide children with an eye to making them value their own characters and to understand how their behaviors form their characters.
Another data point that suggests the practical value of an Aristotle-style “virtue ethics” approach.
Those of us committed to fomenting tax resistance would be wise to keep our eyes on the research of those committed to encouraging tax compliance, as their conclusions often have mirror-images that will be useful to us.
The latest in this series is a paper by Richard Lavoie entitled Vox Clamantis in Deserto: The Role of the Individual in Forging a Strong Duty to the Tax System.
Excerpt:
Societies exhibiting high tax morale typically maintain stable levels of
high tax compliance over time (establishing a societal “taxpaying
ethos”) as these underlying foundational attitudes become enshrined as
self-maintaining social norms. However, if the underlying social norms
begin to erode over time, a society historically exhibiting a strong
taxpaying ethos can quickly flip into a non-compliant one once a tipping
point is reached.
With the exception of some aberrational sub-groups, the United States
typifies a society with a strong taxpaying ethos. However, in recent
decades the social norms forming the foundation of this ethos appear to
have weakened. Scandals at the Service have weakened its public image.
The rise of the tea party movement has questioned the efficacy and role
of government, as well as promoting the highly questionable proposition
that Americans are currently “overtaxed.” Politicians, who should defend
the government that they were elected to run, often act to undermine its
legitimacy and advocate for steep spending cuts in addition to tax
reductions.
These forces, among others, threaten the very foundations of our tax
system by undermining our historical societal faith in the fairness of
our tax system and the obligation to fund necessary government services.
The Tax Foundation has drawn up a map that purports to show how cigarette smuggling in the United States is correlated to the tobacco tax rates in those states.
So, for instance: “New York is the highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes, totaling 56.9 percent of the total cigarette market in the state.
New York also has the highest state cigarette tax ($4.35 per pack), not counting the local New York City cigarette tax (an additional $1.50 per pack).
Smuggling in New York has risen sharply since 2006 (+59 percent), as has the tax rate (+190 percent).”
The phone security consultants “pindrop” have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the massive ongoing criminal operation in which American immigrants are shaken down over the phone by people masquerading as IRS agents. They estimate that 450,000 people were targeted by this scam in alone.
Pindrop also posted their analysis of how the scam works, and even some excerpts from a recording of one of the calls.
Some tabs that have schlepped past my browser window in recent days:
In the face of the massacre by the Ortega-Murillo government of the
Nicaraguan people, from the University Alliance for Democracy and Justice
we call on the private sector and to Nicaraguan society in general, to
strengthen their actions of tax resistance and to stand firm in the face
of state violence, declaring a general strike for 48 hours or until the
Ortega-Murillo government complies with the following conditions:
Stop the cruel paramilitary repression in Masaya and other
territories besieged by the National Guard and Sandinista Youth shock
troops.
Send invitations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights, the European Union, and the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights, to establish permanent missions of these organizations
in our country.
The call is to use every civic mechanism we have at our disposal to curb
these criminal acts of the Ortega-Murillo government.
We cannot live normal lives while they massacre our brothers!
A
survey of thousands of smokers in California showed that more than a
third of them had used legal methods to get around the state’s prohibitive
excise tax on tobacco, and nearly one in five had used illegal techniques.
And that survey was taken before a $2-per-pack hike in the tax
rate took effect. “About a third of cigarettes in California are estimated
to be from out-of-state (and thus tax-avoiding) sources.”
One of the features of the big tax law that Republicans passed last year
was one that caps the tax deduction for state and local taxes. This has
the effect of raising taxes on wealthier people from high-tax states.
These tend to be the Democrat-leaning, wealthier, coastal states, and so
this has been seen as partially a partisan poke at the Democrat’s donor
base and a thumb-in-the-eye at blue states in general — increasing the
amount they’re subsidizing their red cousins. But blue state lawmakers are
getting creative and trying to deny the U.S. Treasury this extra tax money.
Some of these workarounds would even have the effect of allowing people to
deduct more than before.
The Nouvelle Société Civile du Congo has called for a complete tax strike in North Kivu to protest the government’s failure to provide security in the region.
The human war on traffic-ticket-generating robots continues, with the robot hordes taking casualties in Germany, Italy, and France in recent weeks.
In France, according to a new government report, 17,886 photo radar devices have been attacked over the past two years.
The Tax Foundation has run the numbers to show how increases in cigarette taxes cause increases in cigarette smuggling to match.
For example, more than half of the cigarettes smoked in New York have been smuggled in from outside the state to evade taxes.
Some tabs that have festooned my browser in recent days:
Rob Greenfield has announced that “as an act of civil disobedience I will not pay federal income taxes for my lifetime.”
He seems to have stopped paying in but only now made a formal announcement, in part prompted by the news stories about President Trump’s frequent non-payment of federal taxes.
Greenfield is fond of bold and flashy lifestyle experiments.
For example, he lived for a year on only foraged food.
He’s cycled across the United States multiple times on a bamboo-frame bicycle.
He lives on a poverty-line income while donating the income from his media appearances to charity.
That’s all just the start.
The president of the Tuscany branch of Confcommercio (the Italian General Confederation of Enterprises, Professional Activities and Self-Employment), Anna Lapini, announced that fifty thousand Tuscan businesses will stop paying taxes and duties.
“Our companies have no more resources, and we prefer to continue to pay employees and suppliers as a priority over a state that does not understand — indeed tramples on — our reasons for existing.”
Lapini explained that the group was resorting to a tax strike “for the same reasons for which Mahatma Gandhi or the founding fathers of the United States or the French people during the revolution used it in other times.”
The strike went into effect on when a set of taxes came due, and striking businesses refused to pay.
“If working is no longer a right, paying taxes is no longer a duty,” reads one Italian protest sign.
The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with brave mortal renegades defeating the mechanical hordes in Italy, Canada, and France (where one “device has not been able to operate for more than a week without being attacked since it was installed two years ago”), Germany, France, and Australia (where a “GoFundMe was set up to pay for a lawyer to help the… driver arrested for the camera’s destruction”), France, Guadeloupe, and Germany and France again.
Predictably, the prohibitively high cigarette taxes in states like New York and California has led to increases in smuggling to evade the taxes, with more than half of the cigarettes consumed in New York now being smuggled in from low-tax areas.
