More tax resistance news:
- On the NWTRCC blog, Erica Leigh writes about how the U.S. crackdown on refugees and immigrants “is just an extension of U.S. war — it’s not a stretch to say so and we ought to point it out at every opportunity.” NWTRCC has at times been uncomfortable supporting resisters whose complaints about violent government extend beyond war, the focus of its pacifist core, but it seems to be becoming more willing to consider some of these issues as being valid extensions of war tax resistance.
- Manufacturers of hand-woven textiles in India have started a “tax denial satyagraha” — refusing to collect the Goods and Services Tax which is newly being applied to such goods.
The government has responded by closing its yarn monopoly to manufacturers who have refused to register to pay the tax.
- Calling government corruption a “hydra-headed monster,” judge Arun Chaudhari of the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court advised citizens to launch a tax refusal campaign. “The miasma of corruption can be beaten if all work together. If it continues, taxpayers should refuse to pay taxes through a non-cooperation movement.”
- The Kasai-Oriental province chapter of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, one of the largest political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, declared a tax strike this month.
Kabila’s official term as president ended last year, but he refused to step down and the government has refused to hold new elections. Opposition groups vowed to begin a tax strike , among other actions, if the government refused to begin to implement an election by then.Taxes and duties contribute to the development and welfare of the general citizenry. This is not the case in the DRC, where taxes and duties go essentially to the enrichment of a clique, to the detriment of the national community which is subject to miseries of all kinds.… So I ask the Congolese people in general, and those of Kasai in particular, not to pay taxes from until the departure of the current administration. The call to disobedience is for us a means to defeat the power of [Congo president Joseph] Kabila.
- The consumer credit reporting agency Equifax leaked identifying data about hundreds of millions of Americans to unknown cybercriminals. The intentions of the data-thieves are unknown, but such data would make it very easy to file phony tax returns for people in order to leach refunds from the IRS.
- One tax resistance tactic is to increase the salience of taxation: that is, to make people more aware of how much taxes are costing them as a way of increasing opposition to those taxes. The John Fielding pub in Cwmbran, Wales, is cutting its prices across the board by 7.5% for a month to show how much consumers would save if the value-added tax applied to food and drink at pubs were equal to that applied to food retailers like supermarkets. The pub is joining Wetherspoon’s, a chain of pubs across Britain, which is doing a similar one-day action: National Tax Equality Day.
