I have been hearing a lot of talk about impeachment, which seems a lovely idea to a lot of us here. Maybe it is, but I want to bring up another solution to our problem that probably would yield more results: Tax Revolt.
Since no one has come up with 10 Repugs who will shoot themselves in the foot to impeach Bush, it is NOT a more difficult option to implement. Anything is easier and more effective than the impossible.
Instead of waiting for the Godot of Democratic Party action, why not defund the war this April 15th?
The Tax Revolt of 2007 would go something like this: People organize and agree to file no return if they are unlikely to receive a refund. If real pressure comes from the gov’t individuals could pay late with little legal penalty under current law. But real pressure would be nearly impossible to exert on an individual basis if turnout was high enough.
One thing would be very clear if say 25,000 tax payers just didn’t pay up. If these guys want their precious monopoly on power to receive it’s budget, they have to start representing us.
Ultimately, a line item appropriation on each tax form would be a wonderful solution going forward. That would give individuals the power to control the spend appropriations for their contribution. In the world of computers and databases, this would not be as hard to implement as one might think.
Anyhow, I ramble. I wanted to see how people react to the idea of tax revolt as a way of empowering the populace and decentralizing the power given to the 2 parties, which obviously causes some serious systemic faults. A poll follows:
Go down to the Pentagon protest and get people on board and you might have something. But you need to reach a lot of people very fast to pull something like that off.
Which is when?
Does this site have an upcoming events calendar somewhere? If not, that would rule.
March 17th.
However, tax refusal is a pretty stiff offense, and you can actually go to jail.
It would be hard to convince people.
Ditto to the above comments. It’s not a bad idea, but it takes a whole hell of a lot of people doing it for it (1) to have an impact and (2) for them to be less likely to face harsh (as in possible jail time) consequences.
The other potential flaw:
One thing would be very clear if say 25,000 tax payers just didn’t pay up. If these guys want their precious monopoly on power to receive it’s budget, they have to start representing us.
Well, depends on how much they pay in taxes. If they’re 25,000 poor tax payers, then they wouldn’t notice except to charge them with tax evasion, because very little tax revenue comes from them — as a percentage of the budget, it’d be pretty small.
Not trying to deflate the idea, just pointing out some potential problems. BooMan is right — you could float the idea at the Pentagon protest and see if it could gain any larger traction.
Note that you can just PAY LATE with basically no huge penalty. It is a symbolic act to scare pols into action.
I come from a small state.. ok, 100,000 people…
Problem is, when you’re talking about your federal taxes, I don’t think it much matters what size state you’re talking about — the tax pool for the IRS is the whole (employed) country, and I don’t even know that they’d notice if a huge chunk of unpaid taxes were coming from any one state. That’s what makes this sort of thing so hard to pull off — you’d probably have to get 100’s of thousands of people all on the same page with the same timing — otherwise, it’d be both ineffective and at least somewhat damaging to all those individuals. Very difficult form of activism to pull off.
Easier than getting a sitting president impeached with only 49 votes in the senate. Even this one.
I’m not a tax lawyer, but I think there’s like a 25% penalty just for not filing (on top of the panalty and interst on the taxes owed), isn’t there? Not to mention the jail time.
If you owe enough money for the government to notice, the cost of that penalty would be prohibitive. Just sayin’.
This is how much people want to stop the war? I have the power to defund in my hands, but I’d rather not be inconvenienced by a small fee. Note there are funds for war tax resisters:
http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/wtrpf/
http://www.peacetaxseven.com/history.html