Dirty Greek - War Tax Resistance

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual gay sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family and that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would argue, the right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution.

- Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

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Dirty Greek - War Tax Resistance

War : War Tax Resistance

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If a thousand men [and women] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

--Henry David Thoreau

Well, as many of you might already know, over 50% of your tax dollars go towards current and past military spending. Only 33% goes towards humanitarian programs. In the words of RX Bandits, "If you're paying income tax, then you're helping to build bombs. What do you have to say about that?" There's a significant movement that has existed since the revolutionary war called War Tax Resistance, namely refusing to pay all or part of your federal taxes in protest of military action. I myself have considered doing this many times, but as of yet I've been too chicken.

I'm starting to think that I'll at least protest symbolically next year, by filing my return with a letter explaining why I'm witholding part of my taxes. The consequences of doing so are typically slim-to-none, and I will donate the money I withold to a charity of my chosing, thereby allowing it to be used for real human needs rather than murder.

By the way, an easy and almost never punished way of protesting is to withold your federal phone excise tax from your phone bill. Generally, your phone company cannot legally disconnect your phone service for nonpayment of the tax. IRS regulations (Code of Federal Regulations, sect. 49.4291-1, title 26; 1996) clearly state that the phone company is supposed to collect the tax, but has no power to enforce collection. Their role is only to report the resister to the IRS. In the past the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that AT&T (holding a long distance monopoly at the time) could not cut off phone service to federal tax resisters.

For more information on war tax resistance, check out
WarReisters.org,
National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC),
Hang Up On War,
and this list of resources.