Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- A woman who visited Beit Sahour in 2008 reflects on how that town’s tax resistance continues to resonate.
- Voluntary Pauperism is Vicki Robison’s term for leaving the rat race, reprioritizing, and staying under the tax line. “I decided that the only way to avoid contributing to the corruption of government as I saw it, was to not pay into the system.” She says there’s a respectable and a disrespectable way to go about it, and gives some examples.
- The IRS sends out an enormous number of “refund” checks (something like 122 million of them last year, for instance), and all you have to do to get one is to fill out a form with the right numbers on it.
To some folks, this is like setting out a huge trough of money with a little sign next to it saying “honor system.”
For instance, according to “authorities” some fraudsters in Tampa, Florida, hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars this way (which is still, “just the tip of the iceberg,” say they).
The fraud — known in street vernacular as “drops” or “Turbo Tax” after the online filing system — is so pervasive that local police say it even had an effect on street crime, temporarily reducing the numbers of street-corner drug dealers, who found it easier to make money in front of laptop computers in their homes.
