Back in December 2021, I wrote a letter to my 2 U.S. Senators—with no expectation—just a need to vent. I had written to both about U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Sen. Rand Paul’s joint resolution that would have stopped the arms sale to Saudi Arabia for use in its war on Yemen. I never expect… Continue reading
Carolyn and I have been war tax resisters since we were married in 1975. Although we were both raised as Mennonites and continue to be members of the Mennonite Church, one of the three historic peace churches in the U.S., we both had experiences after college while doing volunteer work overseas (before getting married) that… Continue reading
Some months ago I wrote a blog about how the IRS had improperly applied my estimated tax payments for 2020 to the earliest tax years for which I had an open balance. In that way they wiped out the balance from 2011 and part of it from 2012, thus circumventing the 10 year statute of… Continue reading
[Editor’s Note: This work of creative non-fiction was previously published in Meat for Tea.] You were deafened. The sound was intolerable; it violated your sense of decency, your love of quiet, and your yearning for solitude. Why, on the top of this rather small green hill in southeast Vermont, was there this unholy din? It… Continue reading
There is a lot of confusion around taxes in the US, especially around federal income taxes. Many taxpayers are unaware that every year around 50% of taxes goes towards warfare and increased militarism worldwide. And in the wars since 9/11 about half of those tax monies go towards private contractors. Then there is the fear… Continue reading
Recently there was a conversation about death and taxes on the radio. The conversation was in light of the recently released Pandora Papers, which exposed the hidden finances of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. In October, the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters (ICIJ) released over 12 million troves of documents revealing how heads… Continue reading
Three letters arrived from the IRS within a week of each other. On the one hand this is rather exciting since the IRS has been quiet for the last few years, and I haven’t had much to report as far as consequences of refusal to pay. At the same time, it could take months of correspondence to sort out what they’ve done.
“It’s been a hard week for Afghanistan veterans,” began an article on the front page of the local newspaper. While there has been a dizzying amount of every person turned pundit about the war; many of them are on the defense industry dole and would like to see the war continue into the third decade.
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… Continue reading
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,… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
