The Noble American Traditon of Tax Resistance

By Gar Smith, AlterNet. Posted April 7, 2003.

If you ask the average citizen to identify a famous American war-tax resister, most folks (if they came up with a name at all) would probably cite Henry David Thoreau. But how about Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky or Gloria Steinem?

While the author of Walden Pond is remembered for the night he spent in a Massachusetts jail for refusing to pony up to support the Mexican-American war of 1846, his solitary protest was an anomaly. But 120 years later, Baez, Chomsky and Steinem were joined by more than 500,000 Americans who openly opposed paying taxes to support Washington's bloody war in Vietnam.

Today, with tens of millions of Americans marching to protest the administration's invasion of Iraq, the nonviolent tactic of war-tax resistance is gaining new converts. And, as the April 15 tax deadline approaches, Baez and company have issued a new Appeal to Conscience proclaiming that citizens have a "moral duty" to oppose Washington's war of occupation by "refusal to pay taxes used to finance unjust wars."

The link between taxpayers and warmongers was indelibly etched during the Vietnam Era when U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig dismissed the anti-war protests filling America's streets with the comment: "Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."

The War Resisters League (WRL) agrees with Haig on this point: "Taxation is the closest war-making link between the government and most citizens. The U.S. government's ability to threaten and coerce other nations is a direct result of the unprecedented size of our military arsenal ... The maintenance of this arsenal depends upon the willingness of the American people ... to finance it."

The Center for Defense Information (CDI) notes that the FY 2004 federal budget includes "$782 billion for discretionary spending (the money the President and Congress must decide and act to spend each year), $399 billion of which will go to the Pentagon." Put another way, CDI says, spending for "national defense" now comprises more than half (51 percent) of all discretionary spending in the federal budget.

According to WRL, since WW II, the percentage of the federal budget devoted to military expenses (past and present) has ranged from 45 percent to 90 percent. The true impact of this military spending is obscured by several accounting tricks, WRL claims. "Each year, when the government announces the budget, they mix Federal Funds with Trust Funds (such as Social Security) to create a 'Unified Budget.' But, in reality, Trust Funds are completely separated from Federal Funds." The Unified Budget, the WRL states, was created during the Vietnam War to mask the impact of the war's cost by making the military portion of the budget appear smaller and the human needs portion larger.

As WRL comments, "millions of people are underfed, unemployed and homeless while billions of dollars are spent to fuel, house and store weapons, tanks, planes and ships, and to recruit and train our youth in the ways of war." And, because the Pentagon is one of the worst polluters on the planet, taxpayers also "end up paying again to clean up after the military." A Short History of Taxation and Resistance Until the outbreak of WWII, war-tax resistance was largely limited to a few religious communities -- notably the Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren. The rise of a U.S. "War Economy" required an expanded tax base so, in 1943, the government introduced employee withholding -- a preemptive seizure of earnings that brought the majority of the population under the tax laws.

In April 1948, American pacifist A. J. Muste created a tax-resistance group called the Peacemakers. As Muste memorably observed: "People are drafted through the Selective Service System and money is drafted through the Internal Revenue Service."

In 1964, singer Joan Baez made war-tax resistance a national issue when she announced her decision to withhold the 60 percent of her taxes that were tagged to fund the Vietnam War. Muste issued a new tax-resistance statement that was signed by Baez, pacifist David Dellinger, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, publisher Lyle Stuart, Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and thousands of others.

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