by Kathy Kelly

In the past year, several groups have asked me to facilitate retreats for people who want to further explore nonviolence. At the retreats, I ask volunteers to role-play situations likely to generate discussion about challenges people face when involved in peace activism. One of the most reliably difficult scenarios stages a spouse raising with his or her partner a decision to become a war tax refuser and stop paying federal income tax.

In one such scene, an anguished husband implored his wife to understand his reasons for stopping payment of federal income tax. “How could you do this to our children?” she asked. “And why didn’t you think of this before you became a father?” The husband responded, “Honey, I just want to do something for peace,” to which the wife blurted out, “At Christmas?!” The room filled with laughter. Cut! Point well taken.

Last night, after spending Thanksgiving Day with family, my mother and I groaned over TV news clips that anticipated today’s shopping binge. Many progressives refuse to participate in the orgy of shopping that accompanies the Christmas season. But what about the appropriations for weaponry that are so hard to eliminate from our personal budgets?

Daniel Woodham, NWTRCC’s representative to the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Funds, taped some short statements from U.S. war tax resisters to deliver to attendees at the conference in Brussels, Belgium, July 8-11, 2004. If you’d like to listen, click here.

How many of your tax dollars fund the US war machine?

The War Resisters League creates a detailed leaflet each year after the President releases a proposed budget. The figures come from a line-by-line analysis of projected figures in the “Analytical Perspectives” book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005.

Monstrous amounts of dollars which could reinvigorate our ailing health, housing, and school systems are instead diverted to increase the profits of corporations and simultaneously destroy life.

Tax resistance is the most direct way US citizens can avoid being complicit in war. We ask you to consider war tax resistance this tax year, and in the years to come. The best way to stop the war machine is to refuse to fund it.

See our War Tax Resistance section for more information. For a detailed look into government spending of income tax dollars please see the annual leaflet by the War Resisters League.

by Dave Gross Wednesday October 15, 2003 at 03:40 PM

The war tax resistance movement got a big boost today when legendary environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill announced what is being called “the single largest war tax resistance in U.S. history.”

The war tax resistance movement got a big boost this afternoon when the well-known environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill held a press conference at the Federal Building in San Francisco to announce what the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is calling “the single largest war tax resistance in US history.”

Hill attracted international attention when she climbed 180 feet up into the branches of a 1000 year-old Redwood tree and refused to come down until it was safe from the Pacific Lumber Company’s harvesting. 738 days later, she came down with an agreement to save not only the tree she’d named “Luna,” but a three-acre patch of trees that surrounded it. Hill’s commitment and her ultimate success proved inspirational to environmentalists and other activists.