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 other ends. The pandemic is further shaking an already unstable world, where climate chaos and war compete for the dubious honour of most perilous threat.”    

Public Citizen recently reported that ⅓ of Covid deaths were related to a lack of insurance—emphasizing the need for Medicare for All. Currently, over 87 million people in the U.S. are uninsured or underinsured, with many joining these ranks after losing their employment because of the Covid outbreak and subsequent shutdown. Since the beginning of the outbreak, “health insurers” have seen record profits because they have not had to pay out claims as people in the U.S. have delayed seeking health care treatment either acutely or preventatively.

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

In making the case of Medicare for All in 2019, Rep. Jayapal for the State of Washington said, “The state of our healthcare system is absolutely atrocious… how is it possible that the United States, the richest country in the world, is the only major country that does not guarantee healthcare to our residents?“ 

In another report, it was said that there was a 20% increase in deaths deemed “collateral damage” due to the pandemic. While the deaths were not specifically related to Covid infections, they were due to disruptions in healthcare, especially with those impacted by chronic diseases. There has been a rise in diseases in the U.S. that some have linked to the post-World War II era and the saturation of leftover pollutants from that war into the environment.  

Forbes reports, “However, the CDC data do make an important point: that Americans’ poor state of health, mostly related to our own lifestyles, made the U.S. dramatically more vulnerable to Covid.” It is interesting that for some time the military has attempted to justify military operations as a way of defending the U.S. way of life, yet it is this very way of life that is making us sick, exacerbating the impact of the pandemic, and depriving us of the resources to respond both proactively and reactively to the greatest threats to the well being of human and all life on the planet.

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay.

Kathy Kelly shared in a panel of War Tax Resisters how as a holistic approach to resistance included taking responsibility for her health. That is not to say that we should not have structures in place to ensure care for others, but rather it entails naming what ills us and taking action. I am reminded of a repeated refrain that I have heard at a neighborhood association in the heart of St. Louis when addressing emergency preparedness: “No One is Coming for Us.”

For three decades agencies of the military have known that a massive pandemic has been likely to occur with the climate crisis impacting the severity. War Tax Resister Lindsey Britt recently wrote a piece about the need to critically examine the mono-narrative that is assumed about Death and Taxes and to examine that tension collectively.  Britt articulated the tension eloquently in her article, “Our Taxes Are Our Legacy.”

Let us take this precious opportunity and raise these issues, especially in the lead up to tax day. Let us know  what you are planning and how NWTRCC can support your efforts. 

Post by Chrissy Kirchhoefer 

The post Questioning Death and Taxes first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Questioning Death and Taxes appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

U.S.S. Comfort photo from Department of Defense.

Military spending can be witnessed in the costs to the health of our country. No where else is the contrast between life and death so stark. As we are approaching a year into the pandemic and recently surpassed the ½ million deaths attributed to Covid 19, the cost comparisons seem more tangible to those playing attention that the U.S. spent close to 50% of taxpayer money on the military. The Department of Defense reports that the U.S. military has spent $13.34 trillion between 2000 and 2019 averaging about $825 billion per year.  Put another way the US spends over $2 billion per day or over $1 million per minute on the military. 

The National Priorities Project has an interactive page that lays out the cost comparisons of what the money spent on the military could be spent on instead to create healthy communities. The hourly operating costs of the F-35, one of the US military’s most expensive weapons programs, would provide the annual salary of one nurse. Sometimes it is good to have something tangible to relate the numbers— Statista breaks it down here:

Scrutiny of military spending has increased as people have questioned what role the military plays in protecting people in the U.S. when communities are told there are not resources for the most basics of human health. Some states have deployed the National Guard to assist in Covid response (37,000) more have been deployed for the “civil unrest” related to racial justice protests this past summer (41,500.)

While the military may not have had a large visible presence domestically, the language and metaphor of war has increased in the last year as we wage a war on the virus. The parallels between Operation Warp Speed and the Manhattan Project have been made public but not the Department of Defense contracts to Advanced Technologies International. ATI serves as the intermediary between federal contracts and pharmaceutical companies obscuring transparency as other transactions agreements OTAs that the DoD has been using more frequently in recent years.  It  was recently revealed that the Trump administration siphoned $10 billion from the Provider Relief Fund intended to support hospitals and healthcare workers who have faced layoffs and funneled it to Operation Warp Speed. 

The U.S. is the only country of the 36 in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD that does not have universal health care as reported in “It’s Time To Rein In Inflated Military Budgets.” Prior to the pandemic, an estimated 27 million people in the U.S. did not have healthcare insurance and about the same amount have lost coverage since then as they have lost their jobs during the pandemic. 

Federal Budget Pie Chart FY2021 created by WRL.

At the same time health care costs in the U.S. are some of the highest in the world resulting in people in the US paying more than $3.6 trillion for healthcare per year with less than 3% spent on public health and prevention. The result has been epidemic proportions of diabetes, hypertension, heart and lung disease and obesity which all increase vulnerability to Covid 19. Life expectancy has been decreasing in recent years related to those health issues as well as an increase in deaths of despair, those attributed to suicide, drug overdoses and symptoms associated with alcohol abuse. Then as if in the perfect storm of the first 6 months of 2020 life expectancy fell by 2.7 years for non-Hispanic Blacks, 1.7 years for Hispanics and 0.8 years for non-Hispanic whites as a result of all those factors.  

The pandemic has been a period of pause and reevaluation for some to step back and take a more holistic view. The virus has provided the reminder of our interconnectedness. This time has served as a reminder of how fragile we as a species as well as all life forms on this planet. One of the founding members of Physicians for Social Responsibility recently passed away; his obituary mentioned how he joined with physicians from the Soviet Dr. Union to create the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Dr. Lown had concluded that a nuclear attack on one city would exhaust all the nation’s medical resources just to treat the burn victims. While we haven’t intentionally set off a nuclear explosion in the decades since that statement was made, the health care system and it’s workers have become exhausted with only crumbles from the federal pie.  

Post by Chrissy Kirchhoefer

The post Military Budget of Little Comfort to Healthcare Workers first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Military Budget of Little Comfort to Healthcare Workers appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

It’s a thorny problem when the complications of obtaining health insurance intersect with the desire to remain a nonfiling tax resister. This is exactly where I found myself when my luck ran out on the premium tax credit. As a self-employed freelancer, I have to purchase my own health insurance. For the past few years I was able to prove to the state’s insurance marketplace that my income was low enough to qualify by sending copies of my properly filled out but not filed tax forms. I knew it was a risky move when I started, and after the first year I thought I was in the clear. But now they’ve caught up with me and it’s not enough. Unless I file the tax forms, I can’t get the credit. What to do?

OPTION ONE

One option is to give up resisting and come clean with the IRS. I’m sure this is not the first thought that diehard resisters would have, but that’s where my mind went. I had to at least explore the idea, in terms of both logistics and my conscience. I had to push myself to the edge and test my conviction.

After brooding in despair for a while and entertaining the thought of running away to a Buddhist monastery, I called a friend who’s a longtime peace activist. She was a tax resister years ago, for about 10 years, but then chose to stop because she was in a situation where she felt she would be at risk of losing her property. She also said she didn’t have (and wasn’t aware of) the kind of support I’m getting. I called another friend whose perspective I value, and after analyzing the situation, we got philosophical. Her recommendation was to take the path of least resistance. Ordinarily I like that idea, but here, the whole point is resistance.

REACHING OUT

I reached out to the NWTRCC community for advice. Some people who saw my messages on the listserv had discussed my situation, and Lincoln Rice emailed me with further questions and useful information, including NWTRCC Practical #7 on Health Care & Income Security, and suggested that I call a counselor, specifically Becky Pierce in the Boston area. I read the booklet and felt even more confused than before. Then Ruth Benn wrote a blog post about “all or nothing syndrome” that I knew was inspired, at least in part, by my admission that I was considering giving up. I knew she didn’t mean it personally, and I took it as a challenge. The more I agonized over it, the more I realized I didn’t want to surrender. I wanted to keep resisting. So how could I find the path of least resistance within the resistance?

OPTION TWO

Option two would be to go ahead and file, but still not pay. But my income fluctuates—plus, as of this July, it’s considerably higher since I started receiving a portion of my ex-husband’s generous pension. Over the past few years I’ve had to change plans a couple of times due to changing income, and it’s likely I won’t qualify for the tax credit next year and would have to change plans again anyway. Besides, I’d like to stay off the IRS’s radar as much as possible. (Although I am aware that the pension is being reported on the other end.)

COMMUNAL INPUT

Speaking with Becky, I came to the conclusion that I could avoid the whole insurance problem by taking the tax money and redirecting it to my health care. I’ve gone without insurance before, when the precursor to the current ACA came into being in Massachusetts. At that time, there was no federal tax credit, and the insurance premiums were supposedly low enough for people to afford. But they weren’t really, and I was able to get the penalty waived by writing a letter detailing my income and expenses. (I should note that I was still filing taxes at the time.) Even with an emergency room visit one year, my health care costs were significantly lower than if I had been paying a monthly premium.

Becky was very supportive of the idea and helped me find the justification in redirecting the funds to myself under a government that doesn’t take care of its citizens’ health care. But the landscape has changed, and as I dug further I realized that going without health insurance wasn’t going to be an option. It’s financially risky, not just because of penalties, but because there’s no cap on out-of-pocket expenses without coverage. People go bankrupt this way. Even if you have to get a bad policy, or even if you have to pay more than you’d like, you’re much worse off if you don’t have any at all. Plus I’m getting older, I have a creaky knee, and who knows what might happen.

TAKING TIME TO TAKE IT ALL IN

So I reread the NWTRCC health care booklet a few more times, mainly this piece of advice from Robert Randall:

“If the amount of premium tax credit you get but have not used equals or exceeds the amount of income tax you owe, then when you file your tax return you will not owe any income tax and may actually be owed a refund. The way to make that happen is to pay enough of your premium directly to the insurance company, instead of having the feds do it, so that you are owed a sufficient amount back to offset the income tax. In this case you will have redirected your money from the general fund to some insurance company—not the best recipient but much better than the war machine. The caveat, of course, is that most WTRs of low to modest income won’t be able to afford the high premiums monthly. But if WTRs have been setting aside, for redirection, the amount not being withheld from their pay, then it’s a wash. Now they are paying for insurance with it instead.”

TAX CONFUSION—YOU ARE NOT ALONE

It’s hard to follow the intricacies of the tax code, so this didn’t make sense to me even after several readings, but after a lot of mental gyrations and many moments of utter despair, I finally got it. My situation is different because I’m self-employed, so taxes aren’t taken out of my pay. I’m the one who pays. So in my situation, if the amount of tax credit I would get is close enough to the amount of tax I would owe, and if I put aside the tax money for redirection, I could use that money to pay for health insurance instead. I can still be a nonfiler, and I wouldn’t have to worry about proving whether I qualify for the tax credit and having the government all up in my business.

I’ve already been denied the credit for 2021, so I don’t know how much it would have been. But looking at the tax credit and tax due from last year, the two amounts are only three dollars apart. So all the money I put aside for taxes, which up until now I’ve been redirecting to local community organizations, I can use for a basic health insurance policy. I’d rather give it to the community, but as Ruth says, it’s not only about the amount of money the IRS doesn’t get, it’s more about the act of resistance itself.

FINDING A WORKABLE SOLUTION

Except I won’t be able to match the policy I had. The tax credit allowed me to purchase a mid-level policy rather than the cheapest one. I will have to pay more, either in premiums or in actual medical costs. So the question is, does it make more sense to shell out more per month for better coverage or to face higher co-pays and potentially large bills if I have a serious illness or an accident?

Either way, I’m going to have to keep using the health insurance marketplace. In Massachusetts, it’s the Health Connector, a poorly run, unhelpful, inconsistent system with overly complicated and unclear communication and a hard-to-navigate website. But it’s the only option that’s even close to affordable. Buying health insurance directly on the open market is outrageously expensive. Using a broker won’t make a difference; they only provide what one broker I contacted called “concierge service” for folks who don’t want to deal directly with the marketplace.

GETTING A HAND TO GET OUT OF A CORNER

This is all rather overwhelming, a moving target with intersecting bureaucracies and lots of room for confusion, triggering anxiety and fear. It took a lot of anguish to get to this point. It hasn’t been an entirely outward-facing resistance, against the government. I’ve felt inward resistance, in my head, in my psyche. Mostly the whole thing is aggravating. I resent having to struggle with this balancing act to meet an essential need while maintaining my values, I resent the intrusion into details of my personal business.

Ultimately, bolstered by the wisdom and support of this inspirational community, dealing with all of this has deepened my commitment to tax resistance. Pushed into a metaphorical corner, for my health, my peace of mind, and my conscience, I’m not going to give in.

Post by Ilene Roizman

The post Tax Resistance, Self-Employment and Health Insurance first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Tax Resistance, Self-Employment and Health Insurance appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

So, for a first look, here are a few things that come to mind:

If you don’t file, you probably get to ignore the whole thing, at least as far as tax details and forms go, unless you’re a wage employee (see below). You might not ignore the fact that the legislation allows drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and, of course benefits the rich and corporations over everyone else. In addition, the same people who pushed this through now want to go for cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security — and probably every other human- and earth-positive program — so watch out.

As far as health insurance goes, the media makes it sound like the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare is dead now, but it may be more like  a slow death. The tax bill repeal of the individual mandate, requiring most everyone to have health insurance or pay a penalty, takes effect in 2019. What the bill actually does is zero out the penalty itself — starting in 2019. The penalty still applies for 2017 and 2018 at the same level: $695 per adult or 2.5% of household income in excess of tax filing thresholds, whichever is higher. For the 2017 tax filing season (starting in January), the IRS says they will reject tax returns that do not include health insurance information.

With all the publicity around the repeal, there will be widespread uncertainty about paying any penalties that might be applied. Up to now it seems the IRS has collected any fees owed from the delinquent’s income tax refund, if they had one coming. Other taxpayers have been billed for these amounts if they went unpaid, but we have not heard about the IRS applying enforcement actions stronger than sending letters.

For war tax resisters who file and refuse to pay, the doubling of the standard deduction and the elimination of the personal exemption, plus lowered tax rates, may affect your withholding or estimated tax payments during 2018. In order to be able to resist when you file 2018 taxes in 2019, try to do some rough calculations early in 2018 based on the new standard deduction ($12,000 single; $24,000 married) and the new tax rate (see tables in this useful article and try out one of the online calculators). If you are a salaried employee, the IRS expects to adjust withholding tables in February 2018, so watch the federal tax withholding on your paycheck stub and see if you need to adjust and resubmit your W-4 for the rest of 2018. If you pay estimated taxes but want to have federal income taxes to resist at the end of the year, you may need reduce your payments.

For war tax resisters who itemize and try to bring down their taxable income, you may face more changes. The bill eliminates a lot of those itemized deduction categories on Schedule A, at least at levels that moderate income people have used to their advantage. With the standard deduction at $12,000, your itemized deductions would have to total more than that to be advantageous. This seems to be the major change toward simplifying the income tax system: eliminating deductions and getting more people to take the standard deduction. (There don’t seem to be significant changes to Schedule C.)

So, even though the bill keeps deductions for charitable contributions, retirement savings, and student loan interest, with the standard deduction at $12,000 in 2018, you may no longer find itemizing useful. One article points out that this may hurt smaller nonprofits who receive tax deductible small donations from many people. If taxpayers are not getting their charitable deduction, they may cut back on their giving. (Since NWTRCC is not a 501(c)3, feel free to keep giving to us directly!).

There are a lot more details about the tax changes that we will be learning over time, and there is probably a lot more that I could write about now, but this is getting long so I’ll call it quits for now. Please use the comment section below to correct anything I got wrong, add more information, or ask questions. Remember that we are not tax preparers, but we do try to follow changes that will affect people in the war tax resistance network.

— Post by Ruth Benn

P.S. We will be revising our literature in light of the new law as needed, but please help us by sending an email if you see something outdated or wrong on our website. Thanks.

The post Tax Overhaul – First Look for WTRs first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Tax Overhaul – First Look for WTRs appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

As anyone who has applied knows, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has not made shopping for health insurance easy for those of us not covered by an employer, Medicare, or other plan.

In addition, what makes it hard to counsel war tax resisters is that the options vary from state to state. Luckily we do have a network of counselors and contacts who can be called on to respond to questions unique to a certain state.

We’ve written about this whole health insurance puzzle over the last few years because of the key role the IRS plays in it. The 1040 now includes lines related to insurance coverage and forms for calculations related to the “premium tax credit” (subsidy) at the end of the year. It is through information provided on the 1040 that the IRS tracks who has health insurance, who qualifies for exemptions, and who will be penalized for not having insurance.

Today a call came from someone who files her taxes but does not have health insurance. In June she got a letter from the IRS demanding payment for $230 — her penalty for not having health insurance. She asked if there is a network of health insurance resisters, people like her who are angry about being forced to buy insurance from a big corporation or pay a penalty if they refuse. At a NWTRCC meeting a few years ago many expressed political problems with the ACA, mostly because of the role big insurance corporations played in creating the legislation, but we have not been part of a wider resistance.

Since the law was enacted some in our network who were already out of the system (non-filers, off-the-grid) have stayed out. Others have found tax benefits to having insurance through the Marketplace. They qualified for the premium tax credit and manage it in a way that reduces their income tax owed at the end of the year — another way to refuse to pay for war. Stories like these are in Practical #7.

This booklet also includes information about inheritances, with stories about how war tax resisters have talked with family members about potential inheritance and the problems of having money when you have a tax debt. In addition, there’s information about Social Security, retirement accounts, and thoughts on income security beyond the working years.

Please note that we are always collecting stories — war tax resistance information is not based on the letter of the law or what the IRS says, it’s based on what happens with real people in our network. Look at the stories in Practical #7 and those in the other Practicals, and consider sending a story for our publications to help add to our body of knowledge.

—Post by Ruth Benn

The post Health Care, Inheritance, and Miscellaneous Questions first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Health Care, Inheritance, and Miscellaneous Questions appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

Robert received an award for most NWTRCC meetings attended, at our November 2012 30th anniversary conference in Colorado Springs, Colo.

by Robert Randall

Note: This is a follow-up to Robert’s previous post from June 2014.

Having now had a chance to further experience the Affordable Care Act (ACA, often called Obamacare) and see how it really works tax-wise, I wish to both correct some errors in my previous post and further expand on its potential usefulness as a way to redirect federal income taxes from war to something less awful.

A reminder: this information is only relevant to you if you are eligible to receive assistance from the feds in obtaining health insurance or if, as a war tax resistance contact or counselor, you would like to be knowledgeable about and assist others in achieving clarity concerning this new way of redirecting taxes.

First, the much-needed correction: the premium tax credit available under the ACA cannot be used to eliminate or reduce your income tax liability except to the extent that you pay up front, in excess of the tax credit, an amount for your insurance which will offset the taxes you would otherwise owe (see strategy 1 below). In other words, contrary to what I previously had thought (due to some very misleading language on both the healthcare.gov website and in the eligibility letter which it generates), you will not receive any unused premium tax credit. The premium tax credit will never exceed the premium amount of the insurance you purchase through healthcare.gov. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

That said, the ACA still offers resisters new opportunities to not pay for war. We should add it to our list of methodologies for war tax resistance (though, being legal, you may not want to call it resistance so much as refusal or redirection or conversion).

Second caveat: I was right to say that we lucked up last year. Perhaps Humana just mis-judged or perhaps they deliberately underpriced their product to lure customers away from Blue Cross Blue Shield, but, regardless, this year the market “corrected” itself and the platinum plan we enjoyed last year for nothing would have cost us $539/mo this year!! That’s more in line with what most people can expect, since the whole system is designed to have you paying a “minimum contribution amount” for a silver plan. This year more insurance companies are offering policies in our coverage area and the pricing is closer together among all of them, so no big bonus for us.

BTW, my previous post talked about coverage options in your state. In fact, it’s more localized than that. The options and pricing actually vary by coverage area, which can be as small as your county or zip code. I live in an area where premium prices rose steeply between 2014 and 2015; only a short distance away they fell just as steeply. You just have to re-check every year to see what’s currently available and how using ACA will or will not assist you in your war tax redirection. I think it almost always will help.

The best publication for understanding the ACA as it affects the federal income tax is Publication 5187 from the IRS. Go online to irs.gov and get it. I have found that it is accurate, whereas the healthcare.gov sight is both misleading and obfuscates the math. In addition, you’ll want to get Form 8962 and its instructions, Form 1040 and its instructions, and whatever other forms you’ll need to compute your taxes for next year.

Can You Do It?

So… let’s begin by talking about eligibility. One can get a premium tax credit from the U.S. treasury only if you purchase health insurance through the marketplace for your state. WARNING: the open enrollment period for 2015 ends on February 15th! So you don’t have much time left to figure out what you want to do. (But if your life circumstances change you might be eligible for a special enrollment period later. You’ll have to go online at healthcare.gov and apply; if your answers to their questions qualify you, you’ll get a notice stating so on your eligibility letter. Your insurance can’t start until the month after you enroll, though, so the sooner you do it the better. Remember too that there is a tax penalty for not having a qualifying medical plan, unless you meet certain very narrow exemptions. Relevant to resisters, one of the exemptions is having income below the threshold for having to file a tax return. Another is if the cost of the insurance would exceed 8% of your income.)

You cannot purchase insurance from the Marketplace if you already have or can get qualifying coverage through your employer or some other government health plan (Medicare, Medicaid, TriCare, etc.) or if you have purchased such coverage yourself outside of the Marketplace. So to take advantage of the ACA to redirect your taxes you may have to ditch your current coverage or even your employment. As with all WTR, there can be life-changing decisions to make. But note that even though some people in your coverage family may be ineligible for Marketplace coverage because of having other coverage, others in your coverage family may still be eligible. So long as anyone in your family can get Marketplace insurance, you may be able to get a premium tax credit, provided you meet the criteria for doing so.

Filing Issues

One of the criteria you must meet is that, if you are married, you file jointly. This could be a particular barrier to resisters such as myself who live in a mixed marriage (i.e., the spouse is not a resister) and therefor have always filed separately. But don’t assume it’s a deal-breaker: if the premium tax credit can be used to eliminate your liability to the U.S. General Fund, from which war expenditures are made, (and I’m going to suggest some strategies for doing that), then there is no longer an impediment to filing jointly.

Non-filers have a different dilemma. If you are a non-filer and are “off the radar”, you probably want to stay that way and will therefor steer clear of healthcare.gov. If you are a non-filer but are already on IRS’ radar, then it may not matter whether or not you go for the ACA insurance. However, you can get the premium tax credit only if you file a tax return. So if you are a non-filer and you really need to get health insurance (One great thing about ACA is that pre-existing conditions no longer prevent you from getting insurance – something we certainly took advantage of last year.) or want to get it, then you’ll need to look at the math and figure out what your conscience will allow. Once you’re “on their radar” or interacting in a way which makes it more likely that the IRS will insist on collecting back taxes, will you cooperate? If so, how much will they insist that you “owe”? How does this compare with how much they’ll have to pay for your insurance coverage? Can you live with the trade-off? Here’s my thinking on my own similar situation:

Although I’ve never been a non-filer, I have been a non-payer, and my tax debt has piled up over the years. Last year, the IRS started garnishing my wages in March. The garnishment will continue into this March. By the time it’s over, the IRS will have seized nearly $23,000 from me. (Yes, it’s been a tough year, but getting through it is a different story.) However, I can also say that in 2014 the federal treasury spent nearly $17,000 on our health insurance and in 2015 it will spend another $14,000. Adding in the amount of tax we’re paying for 2013 & 2014 (due to filing jointly with a non-resister spouse), we’re still redirecting more money into insurance (meeting at least our human need) than we’re paying to the U.S. general fund. In this way, thanks to the ACA, I can still say that we haven’t contributed anything to the war machine. If you are a non-filer, you might want to look at how the numbers would work in your own case and how you feel about the fungibility of money to help you determine whether or not to change your method of war tax resistance.

Income Issues

Even if you purchase insurance through a Marketplace, you can receive a premium tax credit (PTC) only if your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) is between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL) for your family size and location (FPL is higher in Alaska and Hawaii). This is a moving target, as the FPL changes every year. Also, the FPL used for any year is based on the FPL which has been published as of the first date of the open enrollment period, so, for example, for 2014, when open enrollment began on Oct 1, 2013, the FPL figure used to calculate both your eligibility and your minimum contribution amount (see below) was the 2013 FPL, not 2014. I have not figured out yet whether the FPL used in 2015 calculations will be the 2014 or 2015 figure, as I don’t know which figure was available when open enrollment began on Nov 15, 2014. Obviously, for resisters interested in using a PTC to reduce or eliminate their taxes for war, getting your income within this range is essential. Some resisters may actually need to increase their income in order to decrease their war “obligation”. Others will need to lower their income. MAGI is your adjusted gross income showing on your tax return plus some non-taxable income, such as non-taxable interest and social security benefits. This means you can use any or all of the methods on lines 23-35 of the Form 1040 to lower your income to below 400% of the FPL and thus become eligible for a PTC. (This also lowers your regular tax amount: it’s the DON method promoted by Dave Gross.)

A Special Note to Low-Income Resisters in Certain States

When the ACA was written and passed, the idea was that Medicaid would be expanded to cover everyone whose income was below 100% of the FPL. That’s why the PTC is available only for those at or above 100%. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court threw out the part of the law which required states to do that expansion. Even more unfortunately, many states, such as my own, which are dominated by Republicans, refused to expand Medicaid to cover those people. This has left a cruel gap in available coverage: hundreds of thousands of poor people in Georgia alone who make too much money to get Medicaid but not enough to get the PTC — millions of such people across the country. For them, health insurance is still not affordable. I’m sure that many war tax resisters who have chosen to live on low incomes in order to not pay for war fall into this gap, if you live in such a state. Hopefully this new method of redirecting taxes will enable you, if you are one of those people, to find a way to raise your income, get health insurance, and still not owe taxes for war – if that’s what you’d like to do. Or you can move to a more enlightened state.

So How Do I Go About It?

Step 1:

You’ll need to know your income for the year. See above for how to determine your MAGI. That’s the income you’ll want to use. It means planning ahead.
What if your income is uncertain? You can start with an estimate and change the income figure as the year goes along. This will alter the monthly premium tax credit amount. When you file your income tax forms next year, it all gets reconciled: you may owe more or the feds might owe you, depending on how much credit you’ve used during the year.
Should you estimate high or low? Normally, estimate high. That makes it less likely you’ll use more PTC than you will ultimately have. BUT if you estimate too high, you could end up choosing less insurance than you might otherwise get: you’ll both have more out-of-pocket exposure on your medical expenses and be leaving potentially redirected tax money in the U.S. treasury. Interestingly, there is a cap on how much you’ll owe back to the IRS if you estimate your income low and do use more PTC than you should. This cap varies depending upon your income’s % of FPL and is also adjusted annually for inflation, but, knowing the limit, you could estimate your income on the low side and plan ahead for the maximum amount you might have to repay. Be aware, though, that the information you supply to healthcare.gov is provided under penalty of perjury.
TRAP: should your MAGI go even one penny over 400% of FPL you become completely ineligible for any PTC. There is no limit on how much you’ll owe back, and you’ll owe back every penny that the feds paid for your insurance premium. So be very careful not to let this happen.

Step 2:

Go to Healthcare.gov. You don’t have to apply right off the bat. There is an estimator, and you can use that to come up with the maximum PTC you’ll get. I say “maximum” because remember from the beginning of this post that your actual PTC will be the lesser of the amount the estimator gives you or the amount of the premium for the policy you select. The PTC for which the estimator will say that you are eligible is determined by taking the premium for the second lowest cost silver plan you could purchase (SLCSP) and subtracting from it your contribution amount (the amount the government expects you to pay for your health insurance). This contribution amount is determined by dividing your MAGI by your FPL to get the percentage of the FPL which your income represents (remember that it must be between 100% and 400% in order for you to be able to get a PTC), then looking at a chart in the instructions for Form 8962 to find your “applicable figure” (a decimal amount ranging from 2% to 9.5%), which you multiply by your MAGI to get your annual contribution amount. 1/12th of that is your monthly contribution, which, subtracted from the monthly premium for your SLCSP, yields the maximum monthly premium tax credit for which you are eligible. You’ll only get the full credit if your monthly premium equals or exceeds that amount. All of this calculation is hidden from view on healthcare.gov, but you can work it out yourself with Form 8962 and its instructions, once you have the information you’ll get in the next step.

Step 3:

Determine your SLCSP premium amount. Once you’ve completed the estimator, you’ll have the opportunity to explore insurance plans which are available to you. Look at silver plans and note the premium amount for the second lowest cost one. I’d recommend printing this out so that you’ll have it for future reference. With this figure you can now work through Form 8962 and satisfy yourself that the PTC given you by the estimator matches what you’ll get when you actually file your taxes. Should there be a discrepancy, it may be due to the plans shown to you not exactly matching the ones you can get, and the problem should clear up when you actually apply.

Step 4:

It’s time to decide whether or not to apply for insurance. There are so many factors to consider: some have to do with your current method of resistance, your filing status, family considerations, need for insurance, etc. See above for some discussion of this. More specifically, you may want to look at the expected amount of PTC and the anticipated amount of federal income tax you will “owe” and decide if the PTC will help you with your resistance or not. Because the insurance premium is based on the number of people in your coverage family and their ages, the premium amounts will vary greatly. Linda and I are both in our 60’s, so our premiums are very high, and it’s almost a no-brainer for us: we want the feds to have to direct all that money toward something other than war. We need the insurance (Linda had to have much-delayed surgery last year.). Our PTC easily exceeds our income tax, so we can redirect that money and more by getting health insurance. But, for younger resisters, the PTC may be much less because the premium amounts will be less. If your minimum contribution amount exceeds the premium for your SLCSP, there will be no PTC at all and therefor nearly no tax advantage (though other advantages exist) at all. I say “nearly” because see strategy 2 below. Even if the ACA does provide you a way to redirect some taxes, though, you may still decide that the whole system is so woefully short of the health care we should have in our society and so completely unjust in its application that you just can’t conscientiously have anything to do with it. Add noncompliance to your list of economically disobedient actions. If you can’t claim a health coverage exemption (page 6 of Publication 5187), add nonpayment of the individual shared responsibility payment to your list of refused taxes.

Step 5:

Assuming you have decided to apply for insurance, it’s now time to do so. On healthcare.gov, click the link to apply. Remember that you need to apply and enroll by Feb. 15. As you go through the application process, there are a few screens which will be of concern to you; resisters have posted some of those concerns on this listserv previously. They have to do with authorizing healthcare.gov to access other records which the feds have in order to determine your eligibility and PTC amount. Again, you can opt out if any of these are unacceptable to you. This will probably be a function of what form of resistance you do. The application process itself has been made quite simple: most questions you answer “yes” or “no”. You will need to know the MAGI amount which you settled on in step 1. At the end of the process the site will generate an eligibility letter: download and print it out. Compare the results with what you got earlier from the estimator. Remember that the letter is misleading: it makes it sound like you’re eligible for a certain amount, but that’s true only if you use it all on premiums. The letter makes it seem that you can get unused PTC back at the end of the year, but that’s only true for PTC which you did not use by virtue of spending your own money on the premium amount. You cannot get back any PTC left over because the insurance premium(s) were less than the amount for which you were eligible. That potential redirection is gone forever.

Step 6:

The web site will ask “How much of your premium tax credit do you want to use?” Your first impulse will be to use it all in order to minimize your premium amount. But resisters may want to opt for something different:

STRATEGY 1: Use the ACA to make your W-4 resistance or nonpayment of estimated tax legal and reduce or eliminate the amount you owe to the IRS.
Many war tax resisters, in order to maintain control over their resistance, file a W-4 form with their employers to reduce or eliminate withholding from their paychecks. This then enables us to refuse to pay taxes when we file our returns. The potential downside is that filing a false W-4 can incur an extra penalty and even criminal charges (though our experience is that the latter never happens and the former is seldom assessed). The failure to pay the IRS in an ongoing manner can also incur the estimated tax penalty. And, of course, the ultimate failure to pay incurs penalties and interest. IT IS POSSIBLE, IF YOUR PTC IS HIGH ENOUGH (and it likely is), TO ELIMINATE ALL OF THIS THROUGH THE ACA. The way to do that is to not use all your PTC to pay your insurance premium, but rather to pay your premium with your own money (which you have because it’s not being withheld from your paycheck or you aren’t sending it in quarterly) and then get that money back on your Form 1040 as a net premium tax credit. In this way, you are sending your money directly to an insurer and never owing it to the U.S. Voila! Redirection. No money for war. No free loan to the feds. Your W-4 was accurate. No penalties and interest. And you have health insurance to boot. What could be better?

The downside: You won’t be able to do the kind of redirection which we’ve been doing, either personally or through alternative funds. Instead of supporting groups and causes which are so important to us, you’re instead supporting insurance companies and, through them, yourself if you use the insurance.

Here’s the nitty-gritty for this strategy: First, determine how much income tax you would owe without using the ACA. You can either fill out a 1040 or you can use IRS Circular E to determine the amount of withholding your employer would normally take from your pay (see NWTRCC’s Practical #1 on controlling withholding). If you are self-employed you can do the same thing by calculating the amount of estimated tax you “should” be sending to the IRS. Come up with a monthly amount which your federal income tax liability would be. This is the amount, then, that you need to pay yourself each month to the insurance company in excess of whatever your premium would have been had you used all of your PTC. In other words, when the web site asks how much of your PTC you want to use, hold the income tax amount back. This strategy is ideal if your PTC amount is equal to or greater than your federal income tax. But even if you can’t eliminate all your federal income tax this way, eliminating some of it is still a good thing.

Step 7:

The web site is going to ask you how you want to group your coverage family. Normally, we think of health insurance as a family matter and get one policy which covers everybody. But on healthcare.gov you don’t have to do that. You can divide your family into different groups and get different coverage for each group. This could be advantageous if you know that one person will have a lot of medical expenses but another probably won’t: select a more expensive low-deductible, low out-of-pocket policy for the person who is going to easily exceed those amounts and give the other person a cheaper policy. See also strategy 2 below for why at least one of you may want to get a less expensive high deductible health plan. Of course, you have to keep in mind how much you can afford to spend on insurance. Getting more than one policy will generate more informational forms from healthcare.gov at the end of the year, but basically you’ll just add the numbers together for filling out Form 8962.

Step 8:

Choose your coverage. Ahhhhh…decisions, decisions! The web site will show you all the policies which are available to you in your coverage area. You have some options for filtering policies, such as looking only at bronze, silver, gold, or platinum policies, or sorting them by premium cost or by out-of-pocket costs, etc. It’s likely to be pretty mindboggling, especially if you’re in a place where a lot of insurance companies are offering a lot of different policies. You’ll have to decide which policy or policies are best for you. I’d start by looking at all policies available and sorting by premium cost, just in case you might get lucky like we did last year and find a low-deductible policy priced lower than your SLCSP. The web site will show your premium cost after the amount of your PTC which you said you wanted to use has been deducted, as well as what the actual premium cost was prior to that deduction. For each option, click on the Details button. Take your time and choose wisely. Pay special attention to the network providers. You want coverage which has your preferred healthcare providers in-network; otherwise your out-of-pocket expenses will skyrocket. If you have to take certain medications, make sure they will be covered. When you’ve selected your policy for each group, click Enroll.

One problem with the ACA is that it defines “affordable” for you, and what it thinks is affordable may, in fact, not be affordable at all for most people. The minimum monthly contribution calculated by healthcare.gov, which you are expected to pay for even silver coverage (which by definition pays only about 70% of the average health care costs of those who have it), may well be too much. And even if you can afford the premiums, you’ll never be able to afford the deductible and out of-pocket expense. So what’s the point?

Well, for one thing, under ACA even the lowest cost health insurance with the highest deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses have 3 big pluses: 1) They all provide preventive care at no cost at all and you don’t have to meet the deductible to get it. This is no small thing: it includes all manner of immunizations, screenings for a myriad of diseases and conditions, lab tests, and more. It’s especially good for resisters with children, as they are covered for much more than adults. 2) Even when you do pay for medical services, you will likely pay a lot less than if you did not have the insurance. This is because the insurance companies negotiate the lowest rates they can for services provided by their in-network providers, and as long as you stay in-network, you will never owe more than those negotiated rates. These plan discounts can save you thousands of dollars. They might even pay back the cost of the insurance, if you there is a cost to you. 3) At least there is an annual cap on your medical expenses, however high. You can plan accordingly. A full-on medical catastrophe need not completely wipe you out.

For war tax converters, there’s one more plus to getting even the worst available policy: you are forcing the federal government to pay for something other than war. However small your PTC, that’s a debit to the treasury and, theoretically, cumulatively puts pressure on all other federal spending, including military spending. Yes, I know that the first victim of this pressure is, and already has been, other social spending. But possibly, at some point, it could also affect military spending. It is up to us to work for that result. Meanwhile, as shown in Strategy 1 above, getting even the worst policy available can result in immediate war tax conversion of your own taxes.

But is it really the worst policy just because it’s the least expensive? I would argue that it may not be at all:

STRATEGY 2: Take advantage of the cheaper insurance policies to lower your taxes.

If you want to get free health insurance through the ACA, you will most likely have to “settle” for a bronze plan which costs less than the cost of your SLCSP minus your minimum contribution amount. Such a plan will likely be what is known as a high deductible health plan, or HDHP. But even if you can get or afford a “better” plan, I encourage you to consider an HDHP and run some more figures to see if it would make sense for you. Why? Because an HDHP can allow you to set up something called a Health Savings Account (HSA), and for resisters looking for ways to lessen their taxes legally, this is one amazing option. Make sure the plan you choose is HSA eligible; you can tell by clicking on Details for the plan and looking at the last item in the pop-up.

A HSA is a tax-preferred account which you establish for the purpose of paying your medical expenses. There are all sorts of detailed requirements for being able to establish one and for determining how much you can put into one, but the bottom line is that you affect your taxes 3 ways: the money you put into the account is deducted from your income, so you pay no tax on it. The money you take out of the account is still not taxed, so long as it is spent on qualified medical expenses. And the money which the account “earns”, through interest or investment, is also tax-free so long as it is spent on qualified medical expenses. Given that a HDHP has a high deductible and out-of-pocket costs, you’ll probably be spending your own money on health care, so it may as well be money on which you don’t owe taxes. You may find that you are better off taking the premium amount which you would have spent on a silver plan and instead putting it into a HSA. And, since this will lower your adjusted gross income, it will also lower the income taxes you will “owe”. This little trick could also be exactly what you need to do to get your income below the 400% of FPL which would make you ineligible, or could increase your PTC by reducing your MAGI, thus making the policy cost you less. It’s a weird spiral sort of thing.

We found another use for the HSA: you can use it to actually increase your income, so long as you shelter the added income by putting it into the HSA. In our case, being forced into a HDHP has allowed us to apply for Linda’s Social Security benefit. We could not do that last year because the added income would have made us ineligible for the insurance she so badly needed. But this year we can set up an HSA (We’ll actually establish 2: one for each of us.) and, by putting her Social Security into them, actually decrease rather than increase our income (because only part of your social security benefit is taxable but all of the HSA contribution, up to the limit you can contribute, is deductible)! We’re reducing the income tax we “owe” while at the same time saving for medical expenses.
If you want to explore the HSA strategy, get IRS Publication 969 and Form 8889 and its instructions. I’ll warn you up front: this is one of the most convoluted and unfathomable things I’ve ever dealt with, but if you persevere you may find it very worthwhile.

Another warning: despite the length of this post, I’ve actually tried to simplify things. The truth is that all the above eligibility considerations and PTC calculations are actually made on a monthly rather than an annual basis, so doing your taxes just got 12 times harder at a minimum, unless nothing changes over the course of a year. But unless you already signed up for Obamacare, then something will have changed this year when you do so. It’s complicated, but you can do it.

So, in summary, the Affordable Care Act, in addition to offering many of us health insurance when before we could get none, also offers new possibilities for war tax resisters to reduce, convert, or even eliminate taxes which go to war. We should include this method in our long list of methods for doing WTR and encourage our counselees to seriously consider the pros and cons of using this law. We should also develop additional strategies using the ACA, as I’m sure the two I’ve given above are not the only ones possible.

(Be sure to contact NWTRCC if you have a different experience with your applications or have any questions about the ACA and war tax resistance! This is a complex issue and one we are continuing to track and develop our knowledge on. Thanks to Robert for laying out his knowledge so thoroughly here. – Erica)

The post Update on the Affordable Care Act as War Tax Redirection first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The post Update on the Affordable Care Act as War Tax Redirection appeared first on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

By Robert G. Randall II

Several of you have written about your own experiences with the Affordable Care Act (ACA, I call it Obamasurance rather than Obamacare, because, other than the free preventive care included in each policy, it really is not care; it’s only an opportunity to wrestle with an insurance company over who will pay for what care; that’s better than nothing, but we all know that real care will only come with some kind of single-payer or socialized medical system.) Because my wife and I have had a good experience with ACA, I think I should post here my current thinking on the subject.

First of all, I made a nice-sounding speech at our NWTRCC gathering in New York about opting out of ACA as a form of economic disobedience, because Obamasurance is a huge re-allocation of money into the pockets of large insurance companies and their CEOs. And we know that ultimately it will be paid for, not by cuts in military spending, but by cuts in the social spending most needed by our nation’s poor. In fact, as in my own case, the very poorest are losers so that those of us who are better off (that’s me) can be winners.

Despite those negatives, I’ve also found that, for some of us individual war tax converters, the ACA may be a way to redirect taxes from war to the meeting of human need, even if the meeting of human need is limited to the providing of health insurance for ourselves. Getting such insurance for my wife and I is, after all, better than owing taxes to the war machine.

Caveats: this method of war tax redirection will only be possible for you if you are eligible for a federal tax subsidy (i.e., income tax credit) to help you pay for an insurance plan purchased through one of the state or federal insurance marketplaces. This means your income must be above the amount eligible for Medicaid in your state but below a specified limit based on the number in your household. It also means you must not be eligible for insurance through your employer (unless your employer’s plan fails to meet certain standards of affordability and benefits). You cannot be eligible for Medicare. And, of particular importance for many war tax resisters, it means you must file a joint return if you are married and living together.

The amount of the subsidy (tax credit) is based on your income, the number of people in your household, and the cost of the second-lowest priced, silver health insurance plan in your marketplace. While you have some control over the first two of those, you have no control over the last. And it’s likely to change from year-to-year as insurance companies change their prices or as companies enter or leave your exchange. All you can do is run the numbers and see.

While there are several subsidy calculators online, I found that their results will vary. The only way to really know how much subsidy you can expect will be to plug your figures into the healthcare.gov website. And, of course, this means you need to have a pretty good idea what your income will be in 2015. (It’s too late now to sign up for 2014 unless you experience a life-changing event such as a birth, death, divorce, or loss of your job.) Ultimately, the amount of your tax credit will be determined when you file your income tax return, at which point you may be entitled to more or less credit than was initially calculated by the website. The feds might owe you, or you might owe them.

For us here in Georgia, everything seems to have worked out to provide us with a way to redirect all, or nearly all, of our federal income tax liability away from the IRS and into an insurance company. I would encourage war tax redirectors in other places to at least run the numbers to see if you might fare as well.

Specifically, in our case, because I am salaried I know exactly what my income will be. My wife has retired, so we know that my income is the only income we’ll have this year (she has chosen to delay receipt of Social Security). In Georgia, there are only two insurance companies in the exchange: BlueCross BlueShield and Humana. The BCBS premiums are so much higher than Humana’s that the subsidy we get for the second highest silver plan is enough to pay for Humana’s platinum plan with nearly $1,200 left over to offset our income tax liability. We’ll come very close to owing nothing, which is a huge relief after the annual amount of taxes I’ve had to redirect every year while filing separately.

The final result is that both of us now have health insurance, something we’ve not had for many years, with relatively low out-of-pocket maximums (so long as we stay in-network for our care), for only 84 cents per month. Most of our income tax liability will disappear. And if we do owe anything, it will be only a fraction of what the feds are paying each month for our health care coverage. So we could even tell ourselves that we’re not paying for war even if we do pay a little something at the end of the year, as the net cost to the federal treasury is going to be over $17,000! (Had we purchased the gold Humana plan instead of the platinum we could have been sure that the excess tax credit would have eliminated any tax due, but, because we know that Linda will have to have surgery this year, it makes more sense to get the better plan.)

Again, it seems to me that we may have been lucky and everything just worked out very well for our particular circumstance. I know that others have found the ACA puts them in worse shape. Nevertheless, the ACA tax credit provides one more possible way to owe nothing (or at least less) at the end of the year. If you are eligible for it and if one of your goals is to not pay for war then I would encourage you to run the numbers in your state and see how you would fare.

Robert Randall holds the all-time record for attendance at NWTRCC gatherings over the past 30 years. He lives and works in Brunswick, Georgia.

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The article, “Tax Preparers’ New Role: Health-Coverage Advisers,” makes obvious the connection that war tax resisters have been concerned about: the central role of the IRS. Provisions of the law such as the requirement to have health coverage and the management of the subsidies are written into the tax code. Next year’s tax forms will have new lines to track this information. Now it’s not “death and taxes” but “health and taxes,” among other issues.

“It’s a tremendous business opportunity,” says one administrator at a tax service company quoted in the article. Tax preparers will be able to charge more for their services since the government managed to pass a law that is so confusing thousands of people don’t know how to navigate the system themselves. Adding confusion onto the confusion of the tax code and annual filing means that not only do the insurance companies benefit from this legislation, but there’s profit for many more.

The focus on “market” and profit has driven Dr. Margaret Flowers to declare herself a conscientious objector to the ACA. She has worked for years for a Medicare for all system (ever use the Medicare website? It works!). For those wanting to protest with her, the article includes a petition to “Tell Obama the ACA is an insurance scam.”

War Tax Resister Dilemmas

Aside for political questions and objections, the problems for war tax resisters are real. Calls coming into the NWTRCC office have been mostly from nonfilers, generally people who live on low income or off-the-books and whose choice has been to stay out of the system. Some have had health insurance, but now the ACA would force them onto the books, an option they find objectionable.

One resister asked an insurance marketplace helper whether having a tax debt would disqualify her for the subsidy. The reply: Past debt/issues will not in themselves cause any problem in qualifying for the tax credit (i.e., the subsidy to reduce one’s monthly insurance premium). However, everyone receiving the tax credits in 2014 must agree to file a 2014 tax return, and on that return they will need to reconcile their actual 2014 income with projected 2014 income which was the basis for the tax credits. If they don’t file the 2014 return, it can cause a problem renewing the tax credits in future years. It is uncertain when this might catch up – 2014 return wouldn’t be due until 4/15/15 so certainly not before then.”

In addition, this counselor said: “…if the consumer overestimates 2014 income, and thus on the 2014 return an insurance tax credit refund would be in order, then one could speculate on whether the IRS would issue the refund or apply it toward other tax debts to reduce that debt. We have no guidance on this at this time.” And, this leads to the point that if you earn more during the year than you expected, you may end up having to pay back some of the subsidy when you file.

Others who tried to apply found other roadblocks:

• In New York State you have to agree to this statement early in the application process: As part of the application process, we may need to retrieve your confidential information from data sources, including Social Security, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and other state databases the Department of Health determines are necessary to decide if you qualify. What has Homeland Security got to do with health insurance?

• If a couple applies through the exchanges, they find that they cannot get the insurance subsidy if they file separately. Many couples in the war tax resistance network keep their finances separate, so if their combined income allows for a plan that would be affordable with the subsidy, they can’t take advantage of it unless they file jointly.

• David Gross is a filing tax resister who found a very affordable plan and wrote up his positive story here. He also recommends that taxpayers can lower their taxable income by making payments to a Health Savings Account.

NWTRCC is collecting stories about the ACA and war tax resistance. Were you successful in applying or did you run into a roadblock? Were you a nonfiler who decided to opt in? Are you joining Dr. Flowers in her conscientious objection to the ACA? Please share your stories here or by email.

NWTRCC has published similar information in our newsletter More Than A Paycheck in December 2013, February 2014, and April 2014.

Photos:
Top: Austin Tax Day 2009
Middle: Royal Oak, Michigan Tax Day 2009 by Jon Pickel
Bottom: Tucson Tax Day 2010 by Felice Cohen-Joppa

— Post by Ruth Benn

The post The Health Care Conundrum first appeared on National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

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