Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
robbing the public and spending irresponsibly →
bloated military budget
That would take the defense budget to levels exceeding those at the height of the Cold War.
The increase would help pay for a raft of costly weapons and programs bolstered by Washington’s response to the , terrorist attacks.
But the proposed budget does not include the costs of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for two years have largely been funded through massive supplemental spending bills.
The administration is expected to make a request later in — most likely — for an additional $50 billion or more to pay for those military operations.
The $401.7-billion request is in line with what the Pentagon a year ago projected it would seek as part of a long-range plan to boost military spending to $484 billion annually by .
It does not include defense programs funded by the Energy Department, expected to cost about $20 billion in .
$402 billion for the Defense Department, another $50 billion to mop up in Iraq and Afghanistan, add in $20 billion for nuclear weapons research done by the Department of Energy… $472 billion (see ’s Picket Line, but note that the defense budget is bigger than you think).
Well, what a coincidence — $472 billion is about what we’re putting on the credit card this year:
As Congress moves ahead with a huge new defense bill, lawmakers are making only modest changes in the Pentagon’s plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism.
House and Senate versions of the defense authorization measure contain a record $68 billion for research and development — 20 percent above the peak levels of President Ronald Reagan’s historic defense buildup.
Tens of billions more out of a proposed $76 billion hardware account will go for big-ticket weapons systems to combat some as-yet-unknown adversary comparable to the former Soviet Union.
On the Pentagon’s wish list are such revolutionary weapons as a fighter plane that can land on an aircraft carrier or descend vertically to the ground; a radar-evading destroyer that can wallow low in the waves like a submarine while aiming precise rounds at enemy targets 200 miles inland; and a compact “isomer” weapon that could tap the metallic chemical element hafnium to release 10,000 times as much energy per gram as TNT…
War costs and modernization are expected to drive defense spending to nearly $500 billion in , above the inflation-adjusted Cold War average, and $50 billion above .
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the long-term price tag for all the planes, ships and weapons the military services want will be at least $770 billion above what the Bush administration’s long-term defense plan calls for.
In a major speech last week, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called for cutting back funding for a national missile defense system — a priority of the Bush administration — to pay for increasing the size of the active-duty Army.
Much of the budget increase is not for defense against terrorism, but for programs that add to the already large stash of weapons of mass destruction that the United States threatens the world with.
Today: a roundup of some things I’ve found on-line:
Silence and Courage: Income Taxes, War and Mennonites :
An interesting paper from the Mennonite Central Committee that gives a good overview of the history of the income tax and its close association with war.
If it seems awful to you that fully half of your income tax dollar goes to pay for military spending, you might be surprised to find that this is a historically low percentage — in , 92.4% of the money raised by the federal income tax went to the military.
This paper also discusses the response of Mennonite institutions to war taxes.
Mennonites in the United States took unpopular stands against paying for war bonds during World War Ⅱ, but most didn’t argue with the income tax.
The paper quotes a letter from the Hutterian Brethren to Lord Frederich von Zerotin of Moravia in in which they plead for some way to be considered good citizens without paying war taxes:
“Our greatest fear, however… is that only the name, but not the tax would be changed, so that we would be led into it before we could turn around.
If we then discovered that it was used for war or other purposes we oppose, this would distress us greatly.”
The paper’s authors ask:
“When the government introduced a permanent mass income tax during WWⅡ, did the tax for war (war bonds) change in name only?
Did the government overcome our refusal to purchase war bonds, by creating a mandatory income tax which was used for the same purposes?”
If this page of testimony is anything to go by, Mennonite tax resistance has become more substantial in recent years.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki is part of Ralph Raico’s analysis of Harry Truman’s presidency.
It puts the lie to many of the revisionist myths that still cloud the memory of these bombings in the United States.
He quotes Leó Szilárd, a physician who worked on the Manhattan Project:
“If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
(Here’s an interview with Szilárd in which he reflects on the bomb.)
The Borgen Project is trying to dramatize the contrast between the cost of addressing global problems like, say, getting rid of recklessly-distributed landmines, providing safe water to people without it, or charitably retiring the debt of developing nations, with, say, the U.S. budget for Star Wars or for stealth bombers.
Brian Doherty asks us to go Beyond Conventional Thinking — ignore the political conventions and newsblahblah and advertisement:
“Believers in progressive politics who are interested in the arts and experiments-in-living, as they so often are, have much more to offer the world — and, if I may be so bold, their own lives — by producing art and experiments in living rather than indulging in electoral politics…
While attempting to perfect the entire world, or even an entire nation, is inherently futile and impossible, attempting to make our own lives, and those of our immediate family, friends, and block, successful and peaceful and cared for is something within the realm of possibility.
And it’s a path whose rewards (and, of course, failures) would be real and immediate and fulfilling.
But it is, make no mistake, harder than voting, or getting out the vote, or attending political conventions, or writing about them…
The people who try to forge something new — whether an object, or a technology, or a way of life — will change and benefit the world far more directly than any conventioneer or politician is likely to, and probably have more fun doing so.”
I take him even more seriously since he’s using the Burning Man festival as his case-in-point (he’s written a book on the subject).
In , US defense spending has risen 60% — and four-fifths of this increase has taken place just .
US defense spending has now hit a running twelve-month total [of] $522 billion — a gargantuan sum which is almost a dollar-for-dollar partner to the trade deficit and which is a fairly good match for the total Federal budget deficit.
Thus, not only do we have Twin deficits at present, but one of the Twins wears combat fatigues and carries an M-16 rifle.…
To the twin monetary deficits of budgets and trade, perhaps we should add two other, less quantifiable, but much more dangerous siblings:
The mental deficit which has leads otherwise reasonable men and women into this hazardous entanglement and the moral deficit which allows them to continue along this path, regardless of the longer-term consequences.
Some legislators have had the brilliant idea of addressing the alleged “crisis” in entitlement spending (as featured in the White House talking points about Social Security) by undoing this budget-busting blunderbuss.
The President, who has never seen a spending bill he didn’t sign, threatened to veto any attempt to return this junker to the shop.
Which leads Radley Balko at TheAgitator to quip, “at least we can now be sure he knows he has a veto.”
The Medicare boondoggle is only one example of the whiplash-inducing about-face on big-government spending from the Republican party.
The New York Times did an analysis of the legislation supported by the “Gingrich Brigade” — that pack of Republicans who joined the House of Representatives in .
Back then, most of them sponsored legislation that would cut government spending; now all but two of the remaining Brigade members are pushing bills to increase government spending.
The Times includes a telling graph of the legislators and their spending habits.
And this claim to be halving the deficit by ?
First off, since Dubya inherited a budget surplus — what’s to brag about here?
Second, it’s a bald-faced lie.
How has the Dubya Squad managed to combine tax-cutting with big spending?
It hasn’t come from the promised miraculous expansion of the tax base due to a booming economy.
It’s come from borrowing.
But that’s run up the credit cards so high that even the tax-averse branch of conservatives are starting to wonder if they can tax the poor a bit more to avoid the pains of fiscal discipline or rescinding those nice tax cuts for the rich.
On I noted that the General Accounting Office had found that the U.S. government had been writing checks to defense contractors who cumulatively owed $3 billion in back taxes.
Now the GAO has taken a look at the non-military contractors, and they look to be running neck-and-neck:
The U.S. government is spending more on its military today, to support its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its global military presence, and its arsenal, than it spent (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the most expensive year of the Vietnam War.
And much of this spending is coming from “off-budget” borrowing.
For instance, Congress has “borrowed” $177 billion from the Social Security trust fund this year to spend on war and pork, but you won’t see that $177 billion show up in the officially-reported budget deficit.
Congress has so complex-ified the defense [sic] budget and stuffed it with spending gimmicks, it is difficult to understand just how much is being spent on national defense and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It has become such a jumble that some journalists seem to rely upon press releases from the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to report on the budget.
Doing so is a serious mistake; the committees’ numbers are highly misleading, and sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with what is actually spent on defense.
Measured in real terms (that is, adjusted for inflation), that’s about one-third higher than the previous record for U.S. military spending, set in , when more than 30,000 American soldiers were dying in the Korean War and the Pentagon was embarking on its massive Cold War rearmament drive.
I’ve picked up some flotsam and jetsam that have come bobbing by my raft as I veer off course whilst surfing this Internet.
An interesting article from author Thomas E. Woods, Jr. on What the Warfare State Really Costs.
Not just the tax dollars that are vacuumed out of our pockets and shot into Iraqis — but “opportunity costs” like the diversion of talent toward destructive aims and the resources tied up in maintaining a warfare state that otherwise could be used for useful purposes.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during it used (in dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources.
In , the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion.
In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration takes a look at taxpayers who have sideline businesses that always seem to lose money and speculates that many of these are essentially hobbies that are being reported as businesses for tax reasons.
Well, of course, but the report also has some numbers, if you’re curious.
The Keene Free Press has published part three of Dave Ridley’s jail memoirs from his brief imprisonment after trying to petition some IRS employees for redress of grievances.
(See and for parts one and two.)
The War Resisters League plans to blockade the IRS headquarters on .
“Just as military recruiters supply the bodies for the war, the IRS supplies the funding.
We call on all war opponents to help dramatize our opposition and to disrupt business as usual by joining this nonviolent blockade.”
Every year as people start getting their W-2s and 1099s and start thinking about filing their taxes, the IRS likes to put a high-profile tax evasion arrest or conviction in the headlines, to keep us from getting any funny ideas about not coughing up our tribute.
This year, they chose a case with star power: prosecuting Wesley Snipes on felony conspiracy charges after he refused to file or pay taxes for several years based on his adherence to fantastic tax protester arguments.
Unfortunately for them, the headlines came out all wrong:
It didn’t go quite as well for Snipes as these headlines suggest.
As Neil Buchanan points out, “Notwithstanding the focus on the acquittal for the felony counts, the jury did convict on 3 misdemeanors.
Although it is unlikely that Snipes will receive the 3-year maximum jail time, he might well serve some time in jail; so this is hardly a case where a tax denier got off scot-free.
He does still owe the tax plus interest plus penalties; so for his efforts, Snipes will pay much more to the government than he otherwise would have, he’ll pay huge legal fees, and he’s been convicted of criminal offenses.”
But the IRS lost the deterrent effect that they hoped to get from “Snipes to Do Time on Tax Fraud Felonies” headlines.
To me, frugality is a game, a hobby, a competitive blood sport between me and the government with their running-dog State-privileged corporations.
And it is a sport at which I excel!
Part of the reason I am able to enjoy frugality is because I don’t cut from my/our budget anything that I value more than I value the time it takes to produce or earn it.
We still travel abroad, I still pursue ethnic cooking, we indulge frequently in live theatre… But I don’t write much about the specifics of my various and many frugal strategies even though I am proud of them.
For example, with food prices soaring, last month I was able to cut an additional 20% out of an-already-frugal grocery budget and I did so without sacrificing the foods — including luxury ones — that we enjoy.
Again, frugality doesn’t mean giving up a single thing you truly value; it means discovering exactly what it is you value and, then, finding a way to afford it comfortably… and legally I should quickly add.
Don’t fear that you are alone.
You aren’t. And while the IRS is a big scary bureaucratic matrix of control, consider how many bombs you had to dodge on your way to work or the supermarket or kids’ basketball practice today.
None?
Then you’re doing much better than the Iraqis.
Isn’t taking a small chance with the tax man the minimum sacrifice we can make as individuals who want to stop the murder?
The White House proposed a new budget.
You probably won’t be shocked to hear that vast increases in military spending are in the works.
Fred Kaplan and Winslow T. Wheeler have done a good job of running the numbers to show that it’s even worse than you’d guess from what you read in the papers.
Even if you’re not a squeamish peacenik who looks at expensive armaments and worries about those who will be on the receiving end you should be appalled at the corruption, pork, and waste.
Fred Reed, a curmudgeonly columnist whom I follow not least because he’s done what I dream of one day doing myself (fleeing to Mexico and living a life of mad bliss), turns his pen on America’s militaristic culture:
“The Pentagon, methinks,” he says, “is out of control.
We no longer have a military in service to the state, but a state in service to the military.”
Reed believes that the military is becoming both further divorced from mainstream American society, and increasingly independent of civilian control (once you note the ease with which it assimilates the “commander in chief”).
He warns: “We are going to pay for this.”
This assessment is coming from the Defense Business Board, which is composed of people appointed by the Dubya Squad’s own U.S. Secretary of “Defense.”
This isn’t some peaceniky group of outsiders.
The group’s conclusions could provide some political cover for Obama should he decide to target some of the Pentagon pork to make way for deficit reduction, lower taxes, or for spending on other programs. On the other hand, Democrats — always excruciatingly sensitive to being labeled “soft” — may see this as a trap and may fear running against Republican candidates who accuse them of weakening U.S. military might.
Some bits and pieces from around the great big web:
One way to avoid paying taxes to whatever jurisdiction is lording it over you would be to move to another jurisdiction.
The problem is figuring out how to take your assets with you before the folks in the revenue office figure out what you’re up to.
Kathleen Macaulay has written up her advice for people considering what she calls the “ultimate estate plan” — taxpatriatism — in the wake of new laws that changed the rules for U.S. taxpatriates .
Matthew Yglesias notes that the news media allowed themselves to be used as a propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, shamelessly and without remorse.
To which IOZ responds — allowed themselves? hell — they’re an essential part of the military-industrial complex.
Who do you think owns NBC?
Trying to convince folks that their tax dollars might be better spent by anyone but the Pentagon?
You could do worse than pointing to them to a new report from the Center for Defense Information about Pentagon waste and budgetary shenanigans.
Bureaucrash, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s attempt to make capitalist ideology hip and exciting to the Internet generation, is sponsoring a “crasher challenge” — “a monthly drive to inspire activism on a specific issue.
We’ll help provide the initial resources to help you and other crashers get your creative juices flowing and we encourage you to share those resources that you create.
At the end of the month, the best submission (i.e. video, documented crash, writing, etc.) will be rewarded with Contraband t-shirts and props on Bureaucrash Social.”
This month’s challenge is called Stop Wars and it would be ideal for a project that ties taxation to warfare.
I’m freshly home from the holidays and am getting back to my email and my feed reader and the rest of that big ol’ interweb after some good family time.
So, today: a few bits and pieces that accumulated during my absence:
First up: among the things that happened while I was away was that I got roped into Facebook by some pals who like to play word games long-distance.
Those of you who have also given in to temptation may be interested to know that there’s a NWTRCC Facebook group as well as a more generic tax resistance group on Facebook.
A fascinating new look at the role of the Watergate scandal’s “Deep Throat” by George Friedman sees the destruction of Richard Nixon as a behind-the-scenes power play by J. Edgar Hoover’s rogue secret police against political control of the out-of-control agency — and sees the Washington Post’s reporting of Deep Throat’s revelations not as the act of a paper courageously fighting the powers-that-be and bringing truth to light, but as hiding the real truth in order to take sides in a back stage coup.
Charles Hugh Smith gives us some more of his insights into the coming expansion of the informal economy. According to Smith, in the still-coming economic downturn “very few can operate a formal business profitably, and so they close their doors and scrape up a living in the informal cash economy. Local government will see its revenues wither and eventually insolvency will force a radical re-thinking of government revenues, expenses and services. Until then, watch for the informal economy to grow and the formal economy to wither.”
Jesse Walker at Hit & Run looks at alternative currencies and shares some details I hadn’t heard before — for instance this bit about Argentina: “At the depth of the country’s last economic crisis, about half the nation’s provinces issued their own money rather than rely on the central bank. I knew about the barter-based currency that emerged in Buenos Aires at the time, but I didn’t realize the search for homegrown monetary alternatives had been so widespread.”
One interesting aspect of the five-stages theory seems to be that the next one only becomes visible or understandable to you once you have attained the one before.
In this way, each stage represents a “perspective”, both individual and social, and social “organisms” can be said to progress through the stages as well as individual ones.
So lately I’ve been being very urban homesteader — baking bread, brewing beer and sake, making yogurt, weeding the garden, canning soups.
I’ve been looking for a paying gig, too, which I think partially explains my sudden explosion of home usefulness: it gives me something productive to do while I wait for résumés and bids to be ignored.
What I haven’t been doing much is writing anything substantial for The Picket Line.
Sorry ’bout that.
Meanwhile all sorts of interesting things have backed up in my bookmarks, waiting for me to add some insight or context before passing them on for you to enjoy.
I think instead I’ll just let them spill out here and trust you to fill in the blanks:
Francois Tremblay wonders if taxpayers become complicit in what their tax dollars support. He weighs the arguments for both sides (no, because their participation is legally required; and yes, because their participation is nonetheless voluntary) and then engages in some spirited give-and-take with his readers.
War tax resisters Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman died in a car accident shortly after .
There have been several remembrances of the couple on-line, such as this one from the Church of the Brethren.
Murray Rothbard writes about ending tyranny without violence (through withdrawal of consent) and the nearly 500-year-old insights of Étienne de La Boétie.
The Taxpayer Advocate said in its annual report that American taxpayers pay — above and beyond what they actually are charged in taxes — nearly two hundred billion dollars just trying to do the paperwork involved in taxpaying.
Our local paper did the math and put a number on a conclusion that should have been pretty obvious: it’s much cheaper to take public transit than to drive.
According to their figures, it costs Bay Area drivers about $1,000 per month to get where they’re going by car instead of by bus and rail.
Hell, we pay that much for rent.
A writer for Rebelión notes that Europe’s public is sick of spending so much on the military and asks, “is tax resistance not therefore justified, an investment in the struggle for what is worth the trouble of defending instead of the military costs that impede this to a great extent?” (en español)
Finally, U.S. nuclear weapons spending topped $52 billion (and that’s only counting what we’re allowed to know about).
Compare that to the budget of your favorite government agency, business, or non-profit.
The American anti-war movement is struggling at the moment.
Obamania peeled away many of its liberal activists, and the recent economic churn has pushed war news off the front pages and out of people’s minds.
However, that movement seems to be increasingly focusing its outreach message on the connection between bloated military spending and the economic troubles we’re having.
This could find a receptive audience, and certainly plants the seeds for a possible future uptick in war tax resistance.
For example, New Hampshire Peace Action is teaming up with the National Priorities Project for a series of events throughout New Hampshire “that call attention to the costs of a militarized federal budget.”
This will include leafleting and “penny polls” at post offices as people come in to file their tax returns.
Meanwhile United for Peace & Justice is planning a series of events culminating in an rally in New York City.
is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in and, sadly, the anniversary of his death one year later.
Our urgent call to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be linked to our call to help solve the current economic crisis by dramatically cutting military spending and, instead, investing in our communities.
Note that “the [armed] services’ legislative outreach and public-affairs offices” [that are pressuring Congress to continue to fund porky weapons programs] are technically part of the United States government.
Indeed, they’re technically not supposed to be doing any lobbying at all.
In fact, they regularly lobby congress against positions taken by the civilian leadership of the United States and on behalf of the defense contractors they’re hoping will employ them post-retirement.
It’s not like this is any great enlightening surprise to a cynical fellow like me, but it churns the bile nonetheless.
I’m still working on a bar graph poster for Tax Day that highlights federal
discretionary spending priorities. I think I’m going to go with a poster-board
and construction-paper job along these lines:
The good news is that I’ve got a paying gig that’s keeping me very busy.
The bad news is that I’ve been very busy, and haven’t been able to update The Picket Line as much as I’d like.
: a bunch of links I thought were interesting enough to share but that I’ve given up hope about being able to weave in with some original commentary.
The European Court of Human Rights has denied an attempt by The Peace Tax Seven to establish that a country’s unwillingness to allow people to legally refuse to pay for military spending is a violation of the rights and freedoms set out in the European Convention.
The number and percentage of Earned Income Tax Credit claims that are fraudulent — those in which the person claiming the credit doesn’t qualify for it — has increased exponentially in recent years, and the IRS hasn’t been able to keep up.
Vargarquista at anarkismo.net writes about Smuggling as a strategy of tax resistance (Spanish).
This is a particularly urgent subject in countries that rely more on sales and value-added taxes than on taxes like poll taxes and income taxes that individuals can more directly resist.
If the “FairTax” scheme that some are pushing in the United States ever came to pass, this would become more of an issue in the U.S. as well.
(“Smuggling” is my best translation of “el contrabando,” but the author seems to include a lot of different sorts of underground-economy activity under that term.)
David John Marotta has an intriguing idea about manipulating the timing of traditional-to-Roth IRA transfers and recharacterizations so as to maximize your tax-free capital gains. It’s somewhat complex but very clever. Basically, you do a traditional-to-Roth conversion into several different Roth accounts using as many different investment strategies. Then file tax extensions so that you extend the amount of time in which you can recharacterize those conversions. Wait and see which of your new Roth accounts appreciate the most; keep those (if any) as Roth accounts in which the appreciation will remain tax free and pay the taxes on the principle now. For the rest, recharacterize them as traditional IRAs again, and avoid paying taxes on them now. Follow the link for details and a more leisurely and clearer explanation.
Radley Balko at The Agitator reminds us of this section from Dubya’s address to the nation on when he was launching the Iraq War:
And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning:
In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions.
Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people.
Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people.
War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”
I love the smell of moral clarity in the morning.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
I posted an update about the ongoing IRS software modernization fiasco.
They seem to have more or less thrown in the towel, after years of missing deadlines and busting budgets and burning through contractors.
The latest news goes into some more detail about how they started playing fast and loose with their budget and their milestones as the project started taking on water faster than they could bail.
Basically, when they would miss a milestone and run out of money, they would steal money budgeted for a future milestone and apply it to the work on the one they’d failed to complete under budget.
Clarence Lee Swartz’s book What is Mutualism? () is now on-line.
It includes a section on “passive resistance,” including tax resistance, from which I take this excerpt:
Many of the less important laws are openly and guilelessly ignored or violated every day, to say nothing of the constant and consistent evasion of taxes by rich and poor, pious and pagan, without the least sense of wrong-doing; but the citation of the foregoing is sufficient to point the way to the ultimate refusal of everyone to support or recognize any authority which denies equality of liberty or which fails to give an equivalent in services for every cent demanded for them.…
Until a majority of the people can be brought to see the need for the legislative repeal of certain laws, passive resistance suggests itself as the best means for securing relief from the oppression of such statutes.
This is a method that seems to occur most readily to the average American, for he is always eager to ignore and evade any law that is not supported by a preponderance of public opinion.
He has no great reverence for law as such, and he is encouraged in that disregard of laws and regulations when he observes the impunity with which they are, in many conspicuous instances, violated and flouted.
He sees, furthermore, that a great deal of sumptuary and otherwise obnoxious legislation receives only hypocritical support from many who were instrumental in securing its enactment, and this decidedly lessens his respect for it.
The way is therefore open for making a law so unpopular that the community will not consent to its enforcement.…
Everyone is familiar with the reluctance with which the average citizen faces the tax collector.
Tax dodging, wherever possible, is practiced by high and low, rich and poor, pious and impious, without distinction, And, in all cases, without the slightest compunction.
Since this habit is indulged in by persons who give no other evidence of dishonesty, it may be believed that the motive is not to shirk a just obligation, but that there is an almost universal feeling that no equivalent ever is received for money thus taken.
This skepticism is due to the common knowledge that the politicians who administer the government are rarely capable business man, are primarily influenced, in the expenditure of the taxpayers’ money, by political considerations or motives of self-aggrandizement, and have every other temptation to become prodigal in dispensing funds the provision of which is not due to their own industry.
Even the most uninformed citizen is aware that all government undertakings are incompetently conducted, that the taxpayers’ money is wasted right and left, that there are hordes of grafters in all such operations, who must be taken care of, and that favoritism, at the expense of efficiency, is everywhere the rule rather than the exception.
On the other hand, all experienced business men know that no private enterprise could ever be successfully conducted by the methods pursued by political management and control, and that, were not the supply of funds for covering government deficits inexhaustible by reason of the power of compulsory taxation, every government project would be bankrupt today.
Small wonder, then, that the harassed and beleaguered taxpayer turns eagerly and naturally to the only mitigation of his distress, which is to evade payment of his taxes wherever possible.
The poll tax, the harshest form of taxation ever conceived, has now been abandoned in many states, for it was discovered that more and more citizens were evading it by the simple expedient of failing to register and vote, since the registration lists were the means relied upon by the assessor for locating the person who had no assessable property.
Expediency, that ever-faithful friend of evolution and progress, has again pointed to a logical and serviceable form of passive resistance.
Therefore, by withdrawing support from the State, where it may be done with impunity, and by ignoring it wherever possible, and where its hand bears most heavily upon the non-invasive citizen, the rigors of governmental interference with individual liberty and with the practice of the principles of Mutualism may be modified by creating a vacuum around the arch aggressor.
all records pertaining to those postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers… the IP address,” et (kitchen sink) cetera.
Forbes reports that the IRS is paying closer attention to “hobby losses” — that is, business losses that tax filers claim on their tax returns for activities that the agency believes are not related to a legitimate business pursued for profit, but a hobby pursued for amusement.
The agency has released a new manual for use by its agents to help them determine when a business is really a hobby or vice-versa.
If your business is a borderline case, you can use this manual to help you in making business decisions (and in deciding what sorts of documentation you need to maintain) that will help you substantiate its business-status in the event that you are audited.
While it doesn’t go as far as advocating war tax resistance, this methodical, thorough, Daily Kos post may spontaneously generate such seditious ideas in the minds of antimilitarist progressives.
If that doesn’t do it, maybe this commentary by Chris Hedges will do the trick.
Overly apocalyptic, even by my pessimistic standards, it nonetheless will resonate with concerned folks of a leftish bent.
Excerpt:
We have a choice.
We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner.
We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate.
Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority.
At the Liberty & Power blog, Robert Higgs takes a look at the Obama’s proposed military budget and finds that, as usual, it’s bigger than it looks.
It includes a 4.5% increase to the Pentagon’s budget, but also hides a lot of military spending in other categories (for instance the nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, or what other countries call “defense” that the United States had to reinvent as “homeland security,” or our spending on foreign militaries via the State department).
Higgs estimates that about a third of U.S. military spending is not reflected in the Pentagon budget.
In a follow-up post, Higgs reflects on how he struggled, during his time delving into the budgetary arcana, to keep the real-world effect of all of those numbers in mind.
“Data are fine things; I’ve devoted much of my professional life to their examination and analysis.
Yet it behooves all of us to realize that data may sometimes clothe madness or veil inhumanity, and to beware the power of numbers to lull us into an immoral sleep.”
War Resisters’ International reports on a campaign called “Tag War.”
This campaign attempts to draw attention to businesses that profit from contributing to war and violent conflict.
Amy Goodman notes that all of the state government budget deficit problems that are causing such hand-wringing anguish amongst pundits and government employees could easily be solved just by bringing home the U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and keeping the money we spend to keep them there at home.
Drug warriors publish reports touting their successes that have all of the charm and veracity of Mao-era reports on the latest record-breaking grain harvests.
We’re driving cocaine production down, say one set of reports.
We’re seizing more cocaine than ever, say another.
A group of skeptical reporters in Italy took a look at the numbers and realized that this year, the trend lines crossed, and the drug warriors expect to be so successful that they’ll seize fully 103% of the cocaine produced worldwide this year.
Remember when the divided Congress was teasing us with the possibility of a “government shutdown?”
Heh.
We should be so lucky.
Thomas Knapp of the Center for a Stateless Society gives us the low-down on Government Shutdown Theater.
Excerpts:
When the organs of of American government come to loggerheads on the federal budget, a temporary shutdown of “non-essential services” ensues until one side caves.
Oh, no, Br’er Bear!
Please don’t throw me in the briar patch!
Unfortunately, the compromises usually come fairly quickly.
Government shutdowns generally go a few days.
The record is three weeks.
We’ve seen 15 of these shutdowns since the Carter administration, which should tell us something about how non-traumatic they really are.
So what, pray tell, is the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential?”
Here’s an easy way to tell: If the shutdown of a service irritates and inconveniences ordinary people, but doesn’t really reduce the power of politicians, that service is “non-essential.”
If shutting down a service would actually reduce government’s control over your life, it’s “essential.”
[For example] During a shutdown you can’t get a passport from the government.
Your ability to travel is “non-essential.”
If you show up at the border, though, there will still be a customs official waiting there, demanding to see said passport.
The government’s ability to control your travel is “essential.”
A full-page ad from the New York Times:
The copy reads:
Is “Support the Pentagon” Day
We are being income-taxed and sales-taxed and excise-taxed until there is nothing left to be squeezed out of us.
Yet, the most vital public services all around us are on the verge of collapse.
Because “there is no money.”
Where on earth is the money going?
You know where.
It’s being used to pay for war — past, present and future.
$201,000,000 a day for Vietnam and for so-called national defense.
Another $71,700,000 a day for the interest on our war-connected debt and for veteran’s expenses.
64% of all the taxes we pay to the Federal Government (excluding “trust fund” taxes, such as social security).
To say nothing of our 48,000 sons killed in Vietnam.
And 269,000 wounded, many of them crippled for life.
To say nothing of the deep unrest among the young and the blacks.
To say nothing of the inflation that has cheated our people out of so much of their life’s savings, and which, on top of the taxes, is sapping them of the will to work.
The military-industrial establishment is like a giant tapeworm that is sucking the nourishment out of the body of America.
We cannot let this go on.
On , there is going to take place a nationwide taxpayer’s protest against the war in Vietnam, and for an end to military overspending.
It is sponsored by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee.
If you’re tired of working to support “them,”
If you’re tired of being treated with contempt by “them,”
If you realize we’re never going to get “them” off our taxpaying backs unless we organize,
Then be there on .
Join the nationwide tax protest on
Not much talk of tax resistance itself in this ad, nor of the responsibility taxpayers had for the war, but it represents a good attempt to cast taxpayers as additional victims of militarism.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
A Ron Paul Republican going by the name Simon Rierdon has decided to shrug, saying “the past two tax seasons when I’ve had to fork over thousands of dollars to a government that I don’t think is legitimate, and even more, murderous, has made me rethink my priorities.”
A liberal group going by the name War Costs is swimming upstream against the tide of military contractor lobbyists and trying to put America’s cancerous military spending on the agenda of the Congressional deficit committee.
Speaking of putting military spending on the agenda, you might consider dropping this article in the inbox of your climate activist friends.
It talks about the impact of America’s military adventures on climate-changing atmospheric emissions.
“The Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements” and uses an enormous amount of fossil fuel.
According to the article, the war in Iraq itself was a bigger contributor to annual CO2 emissions than 139 of the world’s nations.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
One of my vices is a thing called Fail Blog, which highlights pictures and videos of people doing it wrong, whatever it is, in amusing or cringe-inducing ways.
The videos now often come with several seconds of advertising in front of them, and the most regular of these, lately, is an ad for the U.S. Marine Corps.
There’s not much to it.
It starts with text that says “our title is earned, never given,” then shows short clips of young men exerting themselves to the utmost, presumably in basic training, then “and what’s earned is yours forever,” followed by some stern men in Marine Corps dress uniforms standing in rows doing fancy drum major style baton twirling moves with their rifles.
Seeing this, I’m surprised at how much of the Marine Corps sale involves the look: the white gloves of a waiter in an exclusive club, the brass buttons of an elevator operator in a nice hotel, and the well-creased cap of a chauffeur; then standing quietly waiting for orders like a good servant, and looking proud of yourself about it all like an idiot.
All of these emblems of servility and somehow they sell it as “pride” — goes to show, I suppose.
But there are budget cuts expected at the IRS.
Douglas H. Shulman, commissioner of the IRS, says that these cuts will
“lead to noticeable degradation of both service and enforcement and would have a serious detrimental impact on voluntary compliance for years to come” and will cause “a measurable decrease of approximately $4 billion in revenue annually…
In other words, these budget cuts will result in a direct increase to the nation’s deficit.
We currently estimate that IRS examinations of individuals and businesses, and collection actions taken to recover known unpaid taxes would be down 5–8 percent.”
Has the U.S. Defense Department killed a million Americans since 2001? asks John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.
For some definitions of “killed,” maybe.
Apparently the government attempts to justify many of its policies by using a cost/benefit analysis wherein a policy that saves one human life can thereby justify $5 million in expenses; a policy that leads to one human death can only be justified if it saves at least $5 million.
This analysis, allegedly, governs decisions made by the Environmental Protection Administration and the Department of Transportation, for instance (not the Department of Defense, though).
Quiggin’s argument is that if you took the money the government has been spending on its “various wars of choice” and spent it instead on those policies that would have saved the lives (or prevented the deaths) of those people who fell on the wrong side of this five million dollar boundary, that would amount to 1.5 million people who would be alive today who are dead instead.
Just another reminder that in addition to those directly killed by the military’s actions, there are also real opportunity cost harms from how we could have been directing the resources that have been funding them.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
“LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government.”
It seems to be a cleverly-engineered, crowdsourced, ever-evolving database of the connections between politicians, lobbyists, business executives, organizations, bureaucrats, and the like.
“The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman” — Melman was the Winslow Wheeler of , keeping a watchful and critical eye on the military budget and both its inherent and extravagant waste.
This article looks in particular at the opportunity costs of military spending, and at the common fallacy that such spending stimulates the economy and enriches society.
Argentine congresswoman Griselda Baldata couldn’t help but notice that nobody was maintaining the road on Route 36, but the company in charge of maintenance was still collecting a toll.
So she stopped paying and urged her constituents to do likewise.
Martin Newell, from the London Catholic Worker community, broke into Northwood Headquarters with the hopes of disrupting the disreputable.
He was instead hauled into court and fined.
He refused to pay and was sentenced to 24 days in prison for his refusal.
“An inspector at the Fresno IRS noticed a package in the mail room with a suspicious odor. … The Fresno PD Bomb squad was called in and the contents inside the package were an unknown type of feces.”
A bunch happened while I was away and I’m only just getting caught up.
Here’s the highlight reel:
The IRS has been pursuing war tax resister Cindy Sheehan for months, and not long ago they hauled her into court to try to get a judge to order her to cough up financial information they could use against her. She fought back, with help from NWTRCC and its legal advisor. The IRS has apparently thrown in the towel! Sheehan posted to her blog a letter she got from the agency in which it informs her that they have withdrawn their summons.
Some notes on the taxable income baseline, how to adjust your withholding as a new employee, and the latest news on the telephone excise tax resistance front.
A “Pull the Pork” protester outside of the Washington, D.C. headquarters of military contractor Lockheed Martin
A coalition of groups have organized a “Pull the Pork (from the Pentagon)” national day of action to try to point out that the sacred cow of Pentagon spending is really a pricey pig in a poke.
Levante profiles ecological and antimilitarist activist Francesc García Barberà, who was involved in the Spanish struggle for the recognition of conscientious objection to military service, and in its war tax resistance movement. Excerpts (my translation):
As a conscientious objector, García Barberà performed alternative service in the Barrio del Cristo, where he became involved in the Workers’ Catholic Action Brotherhood, to which he remains linked, as with the objector movement.
“The objection is in all of life; it’s not only not doing military service, but it’s rethinking the role of the Army and of military spending.
The movement did not end when objection was legalized nor when conscription was abolished,” he notes.
Today he is associated with pacifist groups, never fails each year to make a symbolic assault on the NATO base in Bétera, and practices tax resistance, like a handful of Alaquàsers of his generation.
“We omit the percentage that we estimate is dedicated to military spending (between 7% and 12%) and redirect it to Caritas or some NGO,” he explains, which on some occasions has meant conflict with the Treasury Department.
“Armies defend borders when what ought to be defended is a dignified life for people.
And even if they are dressed up as humanitarian actions, they serve large vested interests.
In a war the strongest wins, not the most just,” he says.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is holding a national conference and committee meeting in Oregon.
This meeting will include a special focus on cooperation between the war tax resistance movement and climate/environmental activism.
He put in a kind word for war tax resisters:
“If a cellphone, burger, or cup of coffee isn’t worth the price to me, I can choose not to buy it.
Were you ever given an ‘unsubscribe’ option from American Empire?
If I want to stop paying to subsidize the brutal Saudi war in Yemen for instance I have very few options.
There is of course a noble tradition of war tax resistance in the United States, with Henry David Thoreau refusing to pay poll taxes that he believed funded the Mexican-American War and Noam Chomsky and others resisting taxes during the Vietnam War, but tax resisters face repression, they risk incarceration, they risk garnishing of their wages, they risk having their property seized, and even moving out of the United States isn’t enough to avoid paying for American Empire:
When you criticize U.S. foreign policy you might get told ‘hey if you don’t like it you can leave’ — well even if you leave you still are seen as owing taxes to the U.S. government unless you go through a costly process of renouncing your citizenship.
And that’s ignoring that there are also funds gained through inflation, through the printing of money, that’s a tax on everyone who holds U.S. dollars…”
I noticed a campaign calling itself “Tax Resistance” suddenly appear on-line.
It has appropriated photos from the U.S. war tax resistance movement, but it seems to be directed at potential war tax resisters in the U.K.
Its Twitter account was suspended before I could even take a look at it.
Its Facebook page is spare and generic.
There’s no indication who’s behind it.
I’ve got a suspicious eyebrow raised, but will keep my eyes on it.
Attacks by motorists on traffic ticket machines continue worldwide.
Some recent examples:
Remember Ed & Elaine Brown?
The “show me the law”-style tax protesters who became causes célèbres in constitutionalist/sovereign-citizen circles?
They were arrested after a long siege of their New Hampshire home about a decade ago and given lengthy — essentially life — prison terms.
But one of the major charges against them was based on a law that was declared to be unconstitutionally vague in an unrelated Supreme Court case, and so now the Browns will be resentenced and may soon be released as a result.
The government of Ontario is protesting the Canadian federal government’s carbon taxes by mandating that gas stations put stickers on the pumps that point out how carbon taxes are rising and contributing to the price of gasoline.
Ontario is also spending millions of dollars on legal battles opposing the tax.
Tax resistance news from hither and yon:
American war tax resisters are fond of pointing out the outrageous sums the U.S. government spends on the military, and the various ways that government tries to hide the price tag by disguising military spending as being something else (for example the recent $53 billion domestic computer chip industry subsidies).
Sometimes the deception is extra-clumsy.
Here’s a great example from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
Notice how all the military budgets are plotted in the same space on the same graph, but the U.S. budget gets its own separate Y-axis?
Here’s how it looks if everything is plotted using the same Y-axis:
Expect this graph to show up in many future “how to lie with statistics” slide decks.
The newly-Republican House Ways and Means Committee hopes to make the IRS squirm.
And so they will have a steady stream of excuses for outrage and maybe some televised hearings, they have created their own on-line IRS Whistleblower Complaint Submission form, meant “[f]or IRS agency personnel interested in providing… information regarding any wrongdoing within the IRS or misuse of taxpayer information.”
Here’s another example of “a suspicious package” containing white powder (which turned out to be harmless sodium carbonate) causing a hazmat evacuation at an IRS building.
