As U.S. forces aggressively seek to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing number of Americans are quietly defying income taxes in protest, RAW STORY has learned.
Leading the charge is the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which seeks to raise awareness about the process of resisting taxes to protest U.S. military expenditure.
Members defying income taxes can face stiff penalties. While some are as small as the cancellation of cell phone service, the Internal Revenue Service has sometimes resorted to harsher sanctions, including seizing cars and auctioning homes.
As many as eight thousand Americans resist some form of income taxes, organizers say.
“They’ve garnished my salary a few times,” says Robert Randall, a Christian pacifist and social worker in Georgia who refuses to pay any income taxes. “One time they seized money out of our bank accounts; one time they did a seizure and sale of our house.”On Sunday, the group unveiled a “Peace Tax Return,” which allows individuals to signal their protest of American war expenditures to the IRS.
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“One form of participating in war would be paying for it,” he tells RAW STORY, “so it’s simply part and parcel of not being able to kill people [which] includes not paying for people to be killed.”
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Others, like Susan Van Haitsma, a housecleaner from Austin, cite specific events as their rationale for refusing to pay taxes. Van Haitsma began withholding taxes in 1985 in response to the nuclear arms race and U.S. incursions in Central America.
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Van Haitsma has a unique strategy for avoiding taxes – she deliberately reduced her income below the minimum tax threshold by trading some of her labor for housing. Unlike many in her Austin branch of the group who are facing collections, this has allowed her to elude penalties.
Raw Story article
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