How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → conferences & gatherings → Fall 2021 NWTRCC national (on-line)

Some recent tax resistance links of interest:

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Content includes:
  • IRS Circumvents “Statute of Limitations” by Ruth Benn. Normally, the IRS has ten years to collect unpaid taxes from you before they have to give up. Also, normally, if you decide to voluntarily pay your taxes, you can also decide for which tax year you are paying them, and by IRS policy, they’ll respect that. Ruth Benn’s tax resistance takes the form of refusing to pay her income tax, but voluntarily paying her self-employment tax. As the ten year statute of limitations approached on one of her unpaid years of income tax, the IRS tried to pull a fast one and used some sleight-of-hand to apply the money Benn was paying for the current year’s self-employment tax to the expiring year’s income tax amount. She is hoping to get the agency to change its mind and to respect its own policy, and promises to keep us up to date on how the red tape tangles.
  • Counseling Notes. Including a reminder that Social Security levies can continue past the ten-year statute of limitations date because the levy is considered “continuous” when it is first applied (not reapplied with each new Social Security check).
  • An announcement of the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering, which will have an international focus, featuring speakers from Money Rebellion (U.K.) and Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga (Spain).
  • News of a new regional war tax resistance group starting in western Massachusetts called Taxes for Peace New England.
• Democrats are keen to force banks to report how much their customers have put into and taken out of their accounts each year. They hope this will bring to the surface some of the money in the underground economy that the government has been frustrated when trying to tax. This proposal has gotten a lot of pushback, and has been an on-again / off-again part of the budget package currently oozing through Congress. The latest guesswork suggests that the Democrats may reactivate the proposal but restrict it to accounts with $10,000 or more in them.
• There’s a nice website that’s been established by the caretakers of The Nelson Homestead — the modest home of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It has good recaps of the lives and activism of the Nelsons, including photos.
• Helen Thornley’s “No Vote, No Tax! The Women’s Tax Resistance League from 1909 to 1918” is featured in volume 4 of Contemporary Issues in Tax Research.
• Environmental activists hoping to stop a new incinerator in Edmonton, north London, are refusing to pay their council tax.
• The Biafra Nations League, which is trying to establish a break-away nation more representative of the Igbo people, has issued an ultimatum to oil firms in the area, ordering them to stop paying taxes to Cameroon and Nigeria, which currently claim sovereignty over the region.
• Argentina legalized abortion earlier this year. Now a group of Argentine legislators have proposed a law that would permit a sort of conscientious objection to taxpayer-involvement in abortion, of a similar sort to what is proposed in the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act” in the U.S.

  …a bill which, if approved, would allow conscientious tax objection to those who are against abortion for moral, ethical, religious, or scientific reasons. In essence, the practice of abortion would draw the necessary resources from a special fund, without using budget items or subsidies from the national treasury. The taxpayer could at this point expressly ask that the money paid in taxes not go to feed this fund, avoiding participating with their own money in the killing of children in the womb.

• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taken out of service by human rebels in the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany & France in recent weeks.

Some recent tax resistance news of note:

• Jane Rogers & Alex Pension from Extinction Rebellion’s “Money Rebellion” tax resistance campaign in the U.K. and José “Cuti” Cutillas from Spain’s Antimilitarista Tortuga war tax resistance movement spoke at the recent NWTRCC national gathering about how tax resistance plays out in their work:
  
• A coalition of student unions in Myanmar released a statement asking international companies to withhold taxes from the military junta that seized control of the country earlier this year.
• The “Build Back Better Act” as currently proposed includes among its many provisions $498 million for the Department of Justice specifically to prosecute tax evasion, and $80 billion for the IRS (both figures are spread out over ten years). Both Democrats and Republicans have reason to exaggerate the practical effect of this. Democrats will insist that this new funding will mean the government can finally pursue fat cat tax evaders, close the tax gap, and result in lots of new tax revenue that will pay for the rest of the spending in the bill. Republicans will paint a picture of vast swarms of jack-booted thugs running rampant over innocent families and small businesses across the land. The purportedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the bill and said that according to their calculations, the new IRS funding would lead to less than a third of the increased revenue that the Democrats were trumpeting. As a result, the bill as a whole will put the government yet further in the red. I have seen no signs that the IRS bank-account-monitoring proposal will sneak its way back into the bill, despite some Democrats’ hopes.
• The human war against the traffic ticket robot hordes continues. In the U.K., Darrell Meekcom, terminally ill and in a hurry to check items off his bucket list, dropped trou’ and mooned a speed camera. Half a dozen furious police officers were dispatched to his home to drag him away with the brutality typical of the breed. Famed graffiti artist Banksy (perhaps) hurried to the scene to immortalize the event in style. Meanwhile spray paint and fire disabled speed cameras in France and the U.K., in Germany someone just walked off with a camera and disassembled it at home while a few more were torched in France, and others were disabled by a variety of means in Germany, France, and Italy.

Tax resistance news of note:

• NWTRCC’s recent national conference featured a talk from attorney Peter Goldberger on the changing legal landscape for conscientious objectors to military taxation. Goldberger says that the current Supreme Court’s increasing deference to religious scruples on First Amendment grounds provides a long-shot opening that war tax resisters might be able to leverage:
  
• A council tax strike meant to stop the construction of a new incinerator in North London is in progress, partially under the Extinction Rebellion “Money Rebellion” banner. Striker Sarah Eastwood is withholding a small, symbolic amount as a protest: “At times, it can feel that as one voter or taxpayer, there is very little that we do to make an impact on these decisions. Though we’ve raised our concerns, we are not being heard. My difficult decision to strike will hopefully force a proper public debate about what is happening.”
• The “Build Back Better” infrastructure bill that recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives does not include dreaded provisions that would force banks to report to the IRS more details about more of their customers’ accounts. The Senate still has to weigh in, but it looks like this expanded reporting proposal is dead for now.
• Some residents of the “Electronic City” tech zone in Bangalore, India, have been refusing to pay property taxes for three years now to protest the government’s broken promises regarding infrastructure and trash disposal.