Federal Income Tax

Biden’s IRS Funding Proposal

In April, President Joe Biden began his push to provide an additional $80 billion to the IRS over the next decade to close the tax gap. The tax gap is the difference between what people owe the IRS and what it actually manages to collect in a given year. The estimated tax gap has been around $550 million each year. With its current resources and authority, the IRS manages to collect about 10% of the tax gap. The Biden administration estimates that the proposal would increase collection by $700 billion over a decade. Though analysts at the University of Pennsylvania believe the number would be closer to $480 billion. Either way, the additional funding for the IRS would pay for […]

Taxing Issues

image of black mailbox with 10 IRS envelopes sticking out the top

The IRS has been so quiet lately that it’s been hard to find topics to write about — except for interesting historical notes or the horrors resulting from the massive U.S. military budget. But three people got in touch recently with three different issues. At a time when war tax resistance seems pretty quiet too, it’s always encouraging to be reminded that resistance continues. One meeting —in person! — was about whether or not to catch up on filing state taxes. This resister has been a federal and state nonfiler with a low income for a few years. Now, due to changes in her employment and the fact that the IRS filed for her one year and is trying to […]

Two Sides of the Coin

light pink background with 6 darker pink horizontal lines with a blue image of a bomb in background with a quote of Albert Camus

The Costs of War Project with the Watson Institute at Brown University recently published a report on the high suicide rates of military members and veterans of the post 9/11 wars. Their study repeated what has been known for some time, that members of the military are 4 times more likely to die by suicide than in combat. While suicide in the military had been lower than the general population in the past, the trend has reversed over the past 20 years and parallels the longest running foreign war in U.S. history in Afghanistan.   While advances in medical technology has led to less people being killed on the battlefield it has also created a situation of more military members living […]

Czar Nicholas II to the Pentagon Papers: The Unexpected Power of Individual Actions

Daniel Ellsberg, 1976

The Pentagon Papers at 50 is getting a lot of attention and giving Daniel Ellsberg another chance to tell his story as well as talk about more recent releases of secret documents including his own. Ellsberg says he’s ready to go to jail again for his use of classified information in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He copied those papers in 1969 at the same time as he copied the documents behind the Pentagon Papers. A couple things have struck me in hearing the story again. The first is the web of individual actions that can lead to such a historically significant event as the release of the papers. Ellsberg himself writes eloquently […]

Report from NWTRCC’s Third Online Conference

NWTRCC held its third online conference the weekend of April 30 – May 2, 2021. More than 40 people attended some portion of the conference, which began the evening of Friday April 30 with a social hour. For the social hour, we broke out twice into random groups of six for 30 minutes. It was chance for old friends to chat, but also to meet new friends. Saturday featured two panels. The first was a “Panel on the New Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons & Paths Forward for Resistance,” featuring Mari Inoue (attorney and cofounder of the Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World), Dr. Linda Richards (historian of science and a grassroots activist since the 1986 Great Peace […]

“Watch Your Taxes”

Watch your taxes Don’t kill the kids Don’t participate in this So said a Palestinian lawyer in Gaza City as he gently shook his finger at the group of Americans on a human rights witness tour of the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. That was back in 1988, on a trip I took with the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, who continue demands to cut U.S. aid to Israel and protect Palestinians. I’ve written about that trip and that lawyer before, because I came home and changed my income tax resistance and redirection from some partial amount to 100% of what was due to the government. This tax day — many “peace processes” later — that trip was much on my mind […]

Redirection and Keeping Track of the People We Owe

Ammon Hennesy

April 15th saw Tax Day actions not seen in years. Well at least in 2 years. After Tax Day spread into 3 months in 2020 to finally conclude on July 15th last year, people were eager to come out on April 15th in order to join in a long tradition of holding that day as a stand out day to raise the issue of military spending in the US. War Tax Resisters and those concerned about militarism organize actions in their communities to educate that nearly half of the federal income taxes are devoted to war. April 15th also serves as a day of action to build upon community by investing our energy and resources towards human needs through individual […]

“The Customary Band of Pickets”

Line of pickets at IRS NYC

No troublesome incidents of any kind developed in the course of the day, although the customary band of pickets turned up outside the Forty-fifth Street headquarters for an hour at noon. Recruited by members of the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, of Sharonville, Ohio, were representatives of the War Resisters League, 5 Beekman Place, and The Catholic Worker, 223 Christie Street. They either refused to pay Federal income taxes or sympathized with those who did not because “the huge program of armaments can only lead to a third world war.” Weapons, it was claimed, eat up seven-eighths of the national budget. In Philadelphia, other groups of pacifists objected on the same grounds. Published: March 17, 1953. Copyright © The New […]

Tax Day Press Release – April 2021

NWTRCC friends and supporters, Below is our press release for Tax Day 2021. We now that Tax Day has been officially delayed until May 17, but many groups are still hosting actions or Zoom events around the original April 15 day. Feel free to adjust the press release below for your own use. If you are having a tax day action, but have not alerted the NWTRCC office, please email the details to nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org, or use the online form. As stated in the press release, we are asking war tax resisters to make their presence felt on the streets (if possible) and online. Please take pictures and video of your tax day actions and send us a copy. When posting […]

Questioning Death and Taxes

woman holding pink sign with black text: "Taxes For Healthcare NOT Warfare"

While there has been some comparison of military spending versus medical costs, it seems as though many are less willing to address the issue of societal sickness caused by military spending. It needs to be named, identified, and articulated. And even fewer people refuse to stop paying for death and destruction. At a recent webinar with U.N. officials, the Vatican called for disarmament in light of the health crisis experienced as a result of the coronavirus from a humanizing perspective: “The pandemic offers us a precious opportunity… prompts us to question how much the huge military expenditures are really able to guarantee the security of individual populations, of how much these resources could and should be allocated to investments to […]

Your Rights: Use ‘Em or Lose ‘Em

Who wants to hassle with the IRS. Of course it’s a pain in the behind dealing with an agency that ranges from bullying to inefficient to inconsistent in following their own procedures. But, if we want to make a statement about refusing to pay for war, hassles come with the territory and are actually the least of the risks that a resister could face. So I was distressed to read the warning in the last issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter about sending a letter with tax forms which might lead to hassles with the IRS. In a rare success for this form of resistance, we won for the right to send those letters expressing our beliefs, complaints, and reasons for refusal. […]

Military Budget of Little Comfort to Healthcare Workers

The most visible role of the U.S. military in the past year has been the fly overs of extremely expensive military bombers to express appreciation to healthcare workers beginning in May of 2020 and showing up at the Superbowl, typically a big advertising opportunity for the military. Even the sportscaster Joe Buck pointing out the obvious of “That’s your hard earned money and tax dollars at work!” and  questioned the amount of jet fuel used for the flyover. Health care workers sat in place of the cardboard cutouts at the Superbowl in an attempt to alleviate or distract from the tremendous toll taken on health care workers including  93% of health care workers were experiencing stress, 86% reported experiencing anxiety, […]