Some thoughts on April 15 -- long but possibly worth your time

[warren pease]

I first started paying taxes in 1968 when I was a kid just out of high school working nights at the Post Office regional distribution center at San Francisco Airport. So right off the bat, I got to help Nixon pay for the Vietnam War, and for the salaries of the Draft Board members who would try to get me killed.

But interesting things were happening despite, and possibly because of, the war. The country was going through a period of superficial self-examination and atonement for centuries of blatant racism (largely replaced by the more low key, systemic kind) and the continued presence of chronic grinding poverty in the richest country in history. And there were some pretty progressive federal programs that came out of that period, as weird as that sounds today. Johnson lost his war on poverty, but there was federal money available to fund the kinds of jobs that do wonders for a community but never get funded by scarce local taxes.

For instance, there was a federally funded jobs program called CETA. My girlfriend at the time got a CETA job with the main branch of the county library, running their arts and music section. She started a program to try and get grade school kids interested in art. She organized a series of weekly free concerts by local musicians in the library’s comfortably sized main room. Standing room only after the first week. She started a program to loan out some pretty valuable posters, paintings, sculpture and ceramics by local artists. Keep it for three weeks, return it and get another piece of free art for your house.

And there were probably tens of thousands of people across the country launching innovative and progressive programs on the federal dime. So in the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s, despite paying for Vietnam, I actually felt that at least a small part of the government was doing the right things and that at least a fraction of my federal taxes were being put to use in ways I agreed with. Even Nixon, repressive lunatic though he was, started the EPA.

Carter carried on some of that, but the country was shaky from war debt (although the usual suspects got richer, as always) and federal money for "non-essential" programs started drying up – which always means everybody loses but the Pentagon.

And then came Ronald Reagan, the genial dunderhead everybody liked, who fronted for a vicious war waged by the upper classes against everybody else. That was the constant theme throughout his presidency and his henchmen were never happier than when some new, ingenious loophole had been discovered that would allow an even faster transfer of wealth (or what was left of it) from the poor and middle class to the rich.

The Iran/Contra plot, bankrupting the USSR into submission (along with the US treasury), continuous invasions and incursions and black ops to suppress national liberation movements – all were either subordinate or intrinsic to the continual shift of money and assets upwards. And the Reagan administration taught me a valuable lesson: Altruism is never a property of governments and power concedes nothing to the powerless.

So I began to develop my own alternative model to the American creation myth, because it was obvious that the country was run self-interested, amoral bastards who lived by the axiom that there’s no such thing as enough money and power. But in school I had been thoroughly immersed in American happy talk and propaganda that it took some time, along with an introduction to Saint Chomsky, to see behind the curtain.

Around 1980 or so, I came to understand that, in essence, I was being forced to buy an Edsel every April 15th, and that failure to do so could subject me to serious legal consequences. It was obvious that America’s political rulers at any given time existed solely to perpetuate their own power and reward the people who put them there. And this reward is what my taxes bought, mainly in the form of wealth transfers to arms industry zillionaires whose sole purpose in life, besides self-enrichment, was to find new ways to kill and maim people faster and more efficiently.

Since Reagan, with very few exceptions, the feds have either underfunded or cancelled just about everything that I consider to be a good use of my tax money, while exponentially overfunding initiatives and departments – notably the Pentagon and the alphabet soup of domestic snooping agencies – that I consider either a waste of money or a perversion of power, or both.

So now we get to BushCo. The last nail in the coffin, the logical result of generations of malevolent upper class warfare against the rest of us. And it’s our own fault; we’re supposed to believe that only our own failings keeps us from joining the ranks of the elite, and that therefore the rich are superior to the rest of us and entitled to their money and power. Economic Darwinism. That’s the message of post-Goldwater conservatism, and thanks to its near-universal repetition, reinforcement and amplification via conventional media, many – perhaps most -- Americans seem to actually believe it. Some societies want to eat the rich; Americans want to be the rich.

And here it is, coming up on April 15th, and I’m kicking the tires on yet another Edsel. But this time, the Edsel is not only an engineering joke, but it’s actively evil and bent on my destruction, metaphorically speaking.

This administration is so despicable that they’ve even managed to radicalize my thoughtful, New Deal Democrat, 83-year-old mother, who had spent her life believing in the two party system and the power of the federal government, at least when wielded by Democrats, to act as a force for good, here and around the world. It’s total horseshit and unsupported by the facts, but I’ve always respected her faith in the ability of government to push for policies that reward decency and punish the abuse of power. It’s a comfortable world view, and there was a time not too long ago when, although maybe naïve, it wasn’t just a sick joke.

Now I get angry emails from her advocating impeachment and imprisonment, notifying me of the outrage du jour, castigating the Democrats in congress for giving an inch. She’s preaching to the converted, but it’s amazing to watch as her longest-held, most fundamental political beliefs are shredded beyond recognition.

So I have a choice to make. Do I pay to support a government whose every policy, program and initiative I despise, as I despise the people running it? Or do I just say enough, I simply can’t give these vile, corrupt bastards and their dominionist-fascist agenda a single penny more?

I don’t know. I’ve got less than a week to decide and I don’t have any idea what I’ll do. But either way, my decision will have consequences. Either I suppress my rage and continue to pay for BushCo’s assault against everything I believe in, and pay for policies that disgust me, or I put my head on the IRS chopping block.

I’m not really looking for advice, since I probably wouldn’t take it anyway. But I would be very interested in hearing from others who are struggling with the same problem. There’s comfort in numbers, and I feel very uncomfortable at the moment.


wp

on edit: I'll be out for a couple of hours and not monitoring posts on this topic. However, if you have thoughts on this, please post them and I'll check in later this afternoon.

[Parche]

1. TAX

Its actually the 17th this year isnt it?

I am not paying for a while, as I owe a few hundred, and me pissed

There is NO tax break contrary to what the Republicans say, I am paying more now
and making less, then when Clinton was President

Its a Phallacy.....(No Pun Intended)

[Raven]

2. Hold your nose and pay your taxes and

keep working for change...it will come.

[warren pease]

10. That's what I've been doing for about 30 years...

And I'm finally getting completely fed up with it. BushCo is the catalyst, but it could just as well have been Clinton for NAFTA and the Telecom Act, or Bush I and Iraq Invasion I.

Anyway, thanks for reading and thanks for the thought. We'll see what happens.

wp

[Squatch]

3. If everybody was free to choose to pay for only the governments

they agree with, then we'd be in a world of hurt. As much as I absolutely loathe taxes, regardless of the in situ administration, I dutifully file my returns on time, each year.

Thankfully, I've been getting money back each year for the past 5 or 6.

[kath]

5. Actually, it's not good to be getting a refund - means that the govt has been using your money

interest-free.
The IRS has a detailed withholding calculator on their website - using this, you can get your withholding to come out very close and avoid a refund or avoid owing a large amount.

[Squatch]

6. It's because I own a small business.

It's difficult to estimate taxes for the upcoming year.

[kath]

14. ah, that's a different situation. But many people with wages (not business income) end up with a

*large* refund each year, which is just plain dumb.

[warren pease]

11. Line item veto...

That's what Saint Reagan wanted so that he could identify and cross out all money going to anybody but the rich. Fortunately, he never got congress to give it to him. And now, ironically enough, that's exactly what I want. In a way, it's just smart consumerism. I don't want to pay for useless or malevolent crap.

However, absent my own line item veto, it's all or nothing.

So we'll see.


wp

[Auggie]

4. Nice post wp. Pay the tax -- and be sure to utilize every legal deduction.

The potential consequences of not paying aren't worth it.

[warren pease]

9. Deductions

I try. I'm an S-Corp, and the stuff you can get away with legally is way better than cheating. For example: I can hold no fewer than one and no more than four board meetings a year, anyplace in the world. My wife is my CFO, and we would get to fly to, say, Paris (tickets fully deductible), stay in any hotel we could afford (room fees fully deductible), hold our meeting at the finest restaurant we could afford (fully deductible) stick around another few days to relieve the stress of the momentous business decisions we made at the board meeting (again, hotel expenses fully deductible), then fly back home (fully deductible), pay the fee for long-term parking (fully deductible) and drive home on a tank of fully deductible gas. And we can do that three more times in any given year.

It's pretty sick, and this is just an S-Corp. You can multiply that by any large number you choose to get an idea of how our corporate welfare queens can afford to send their top sales people to The Bahamas for a week. But I figure if you're going to live in the world champion of radical capitalism, you might as well take the loopholes the lobbyists paid for.

And again, it's not that I can't pay what I allegedly owe the feds. Fortunately, I can cover this year's taxes -- it's not really that much money. But I don't want to, for all the reasons I mentioned above. If one or two people refuse, they'll be up on charges and face stiff penalties. If one or two million refuse, it gets a little tougher for the feds to deal with. And if ten or twenty million refuse, it's a bloodless revolution.

And really, since voting is suspect, congress is cautious and protests aren't acknowledged by their targets, the only recourse left is to cut them off at the purse.

However, I'm still undecided, and thanks for taking the time to read the long OP.

wp

[ljm2002]

12. "If one or two people refuse,"...

..."they'll be up on charges and face stiff penalties. If one or two million refuse, it gets a little tougher for the feds to deal with. And if ten or twenty million refuse, it's a bloodless revolution.

And really, since voting is suspect, congress is cautious and protests aren't acknowledged by their targets, the only recourse left is to cut them off at the purse."

If only I could believe it possible! It would get the attention of the politicians in Washington as nothing else would, that's for sure.

Thanks for the inspiration!

[warren pease]

13. You're welcome...

Now all it takes is a nationwide epidemic of gigantic brass balls, and their female equivalent, and we can all breathe easier.

wp

[sinkingfeeling]

7. If you can make a choice, you're either self-employed and had no deductions

or you didn't have enough withheld or you're willing to forfeit any refund. I've never been in that position. I've always filed and taken my refund, no matter how small the amount. Just tell yourself that your taxes are 100% going for the programs you approve of and that 100% of all your neighbors' taxes are paying for wars and spying, etc.

[warren pease]

8. Self employed, no 10-99s n/t

[Jcrowley]

15. Don't pay

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm



Check it out:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x620399

[warren pease]

16. Thanks for the links

And what a fucking obscenity. 59 percent for "defense," and 4 percent for veterans services and benefits. That's about what you'd expect from these rotten bastards. It's way cheaper to transport bodies than it is to care for the maimed. I'm sure their actuaries figured that one out some time ago, which may account for the absence of body armor, proper shielding for vehicles and frequent shortages of other basics for staying alive. But McCain says it's safe, and his stooge said it's like a market in Indiana, and his other stooge pumped five whole US dollars into the local economy, so what the hell.

God I hate these miserable pricks.


wp