Uncle Sam wants YOUR money!

Correction: Uncle Sam wants your money unless you are among the country’s largest U.S. corporations (e.g., GE, Microsoft, IBM, Exxon, Chevron). As reported in that radical rag, the Wall Street Journal, 60 of those large corporations “parked a total of $166 billion offshore last year” shielding anywhere from 40 percent to 100% of their profits from U.S. taxes.

It takes taxes and bonds poster
Image in public domain

While avoiding payment of taxes in the U.S., these corporations relied on the U.S. government to protect their interests from, for example, those who object to extraction of their natural resources by American companies.

Today is April 15. You have probably filed your 2012 income tax return, but in the coming year it would be wise to attend to proposals being made by the President and Congress regarding who will pay taxes and how the money will be spent.

You may have heard about proposed cuts in Social Security and medical and social welfare programs. Do you also know that President Obama is proposing a half billion dollar shift of funds from nuclear nonproliferation programs to upgrading the U.S. nuclear program?

Are your priorities the same as the government’s?

Historically, Americans have found many nonviolent ways to protest or rebel against taxes they judged to be unfair or immoral.

  • In 1773, to protest the tea tax imposed by the English government to finance its wars, colonists in Boston dumped English tea into Boston Harbor;
  • During and after the Revolutionary War, many Quakers, Mennonites, and members of other peace-oriented religious denominations refused to pay taxes intended for military expenditures;
  • Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a toll tax levied to support the Mexican War, spent a night in jail, and wrote about it in the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
  • Since World War II, many individuals (e.g., Noam Chomsky) have formed groups to protest using tax dollars to finance war. You can learn more from the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee  (http://www.nwtrcc.org/ ).

War tax resistance may not be the right choice for you, but do consider this question: Are the issues raised here important enough so that you will make your own voice heard?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology