Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → religious groups and the religious perspective → Catholic Worker movement → Chrissy Kirchhoefer

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content that includes:

• Ruth Benn looks at the post-election prospects of the war tax resistance movement
• Joel Mathis reports on war tax resistance talk among Kansas Mennonites
• Cathy Deppe reports back from the International Peace Bureau World Peace Conference
• Some movement news including a report from the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters & Supporters, and Erica Weiland’s report back from the School of the Americas Watch Border Convergence at Nogales.
• A recap of the NWTRCC fall national gathering in Florida
• Chrissy Kirchhoefer connects the work of war tax resisters with the Dakota Access Pipeline struggle in North Dakota

There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content including:

• Lincoln Rice considers war tax redirection as a form of slavery reparations
• Ruth Benn examines the implications of inheritances for war tax resisters
• Tax law and policy changes:
  • lock-in letters that interfere with resisters’ who want to block paycheck withholding
  • the new W-4 forms that have come out to conform to the new tax law
  • standard deduction amounts for the 2019 tax year
  • the toll of ongoing IRS impersonation scams
  • the recent drastic collapse of IRS enforcement effort against non-filers and non-payers
• Some international news of resisters from Spain and Turkish Cyprus
• A profile of NWTRCC’s new outreach consultant, Chrissy Kirchhoefer

In other news:

• IRS employees got back to work after the “shutdown” and found that over 5,000,000 letters had piled up on their desks while they were away.
• TaxProf Blog gives a fascinating overview of the bureaucratic morass the IRS slogs through even on a good day, when it’s not shut down. There are multiple oversight bodies and committees all demanding that the agency do this or that, and obsolete laws demanding that it collect irrelevant data. It’s a wonder they can get anything done.

Some links that have bubbled up in my browser over the past few weeks as I’ve been on my Brethren binge:

• Businesses in Chattanooga, Tennesseee held a one-day strike in support of #BlackLivesMatter, as a way to withhold sales tax dollars in order to pressure the city government to redirect funding from the police department to less-nefarious uses.
• American war tax resister Ed Agro has died. Agro was one of the founders of the New England War Tax Resistance regional group, and was also the admin behind the wtr-s war tax resistance email list.

• The Mennonite Church USA is promoting its reinvigorated “War Tax Alternative Fund” through which Mennonites can redirect their taxes from the U.S. government to more worthy causes.

  Richard Yoder responds in a letter: “I am grateful that there seems to be a renewed emphasis on the historic peace witness of the Mennonite tradition, including war-tax resistance and redirecting of our tax dollars to life-giving activities. The nature of warfare has changed from the past when the military needed our bodies to now needing our dollars to pay for high-tech warfare. So in the same way Mennonites in the past found a way to say no to participating in war through conscientious objection, we now need to do the same with our tax dollars.”

• NWTRCC coordinator Lincoln Rice explores the connections between war tax resistance and resistance to militarized and militant domestic police forces, and Chrissy Kirchhoefer notes that while some of the troops have come home, that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped trooping.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.
• Jim Loewen reflects on his token tax resistance efforts during the Vietnam War — and how he got an in-person visit from an IRS agent over a $6 tax bill.
• The human rebellion against traffic ticket radar robots continues, with robot hordes falling to the rebels in France, England, and Germany; France a few more times; Belgium and France; France again; Mexico, Spain, and France; and France and Germany in recent weeks.
• Paolo Bozzi shares some notes from a recent workshop on “Not Paying Taxes: Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance, and Tax Resistance in Historical Perspective.”
• An Italian “orange vest” nationalist movement is calling for a tax strike to pressure the government to call new elections and withdraw from the Euro.
• Aidan Collymore gives a whirlwind tour of existing studies in “The Ethics of Tax Evasion: Literature Review.”
• Karen Robinson looks back at the history of the campaign for a “peace tax” in the U.K. parliament.
• A Glasgow man whose apartment keeps getting flooded has accused the city of negligence for signing off on the building’s construction, and is refusing to pay his council tax as a pressure tactic.