Joe Stack IRS attack and the growth of the tax resistance movement
| Atlanta
Commenting on the suicide plane attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas, by tax resister Joe Stack, actor and tax protester shrugged his shoulders and said: "I think [tax revolt] was an issue even for the early colonists and the British, so what's new?"
The Boston Tea Party. The Whiskey Rebellion. The Sagebrush Rebellion.
Since its very founding, the US has been awash in sometimes violent anti-tax movements, giving way to a strain, amid ever broader federal reach, of a particularly pervasive, and more individualistic, form of rebellion in the late 20th century: The tax-resistance, or tax-denial, phenomenon.
Mr. Stack, a software engineer and musician, apparently bought into a tax resistance argument that dates back to the 1950s, as he references in his 3,000 word manifesto his attempt to claim 鈥渨onderful exemptions" that the IRS ultimately didn't approve.
Two people, including Stack, died and two others were hurt after he piloted his Piper Cherokee into a 200-person IRS office in Austin鈥檚 Echelon Building on Thursday.
Deep resistance to taxation
Though few hail Stack鈥檚 arguably terrorist act as an appropriate retort against the taxman, his lament does dovetail with a deep resistance in the American zeitgeist to over-bearing taxation.
That鈥檚 why the made much of a recent IRS purchase order for 60 sawed-off shotguns, which shouldn鈥檛 have been that surprising since the IRS鈥� criminal division already has 2,700 armed special agents.
Escaping European serfdom, Americans mixed their latent distrust of centralized power with a sense of individual and economic freedom, which modern conservatism, especially, equates with tax relief.
At the same time, the Great Depression and rise of the New Deal showed many Americans that the industrial era required new federal protections for workers.
But that decades-long expansion of federal power and national debt has come under fire as President Obama and the Democratic Congress attempt to expand Washington鈥檚 power to tax and spend even further, ostensibly for the good of all Americans.
鈥淢ost Americans would probably agree that our hatred for taxes has something to do with a more profound aversion to government in general 鈥� an aversion with deep roots in our history,鈥� writes Robin Einhorn, author of 鈥淎merican Taxation, American Slavery,鈥� in a 2006 essay. 鈥淎 nation founded in a tax revolt, we are told, is true to itself only when it is 鈥榮tarving the beast.鈥欌��
Yet the fomenters of the original Boston Tea Party, Mr. Einhorn writes, 鈥渉ad no interest in renouncing their own power to tax themselves.鈥�
Terrorist plots against the IRS
The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project counts five known domestic terrorist plots against the IRS in the past 15 years. Tensions are rising as federal tax authorities have begun stepping up collection efforts in the midst of flagging tax receipts.
"There's been an explosive growth of anti-government militias and so-called Patriot groups over the past year, and the central idea of many of them is that taxes are completely illegitimate," Intelligence Project editor Mark Potok .
It鈥檚 not just conservatives, either. Part of the tax resistance movement is left-wing resisters who don鈥檛 want their tax money spent on foreign wars.
Some resisters , the AP writes, believe the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to levy income taxes, was not legally ratified; it was ratified in 1913. There鈥檚 also a belief that paying taxes is purely voluntary (nope, the IRS says).
鈥淯nfortunately, on the fringes of the new anti-elitism, pockets of extreme anti-tax resistance rage,鈥� Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.
Jonathan Siegel, a law professor at George Washington University, that the tax-protester or tax-denier movement has been fueled in the past two decades by technology.
Yet, Mr. Siegel adds, 鈥淢r. Stack doesn't fit the traditional profile of a tax denier because, while he appears to have complained about taxes and sought to evade them, he didn't claim he was under no legal obligation to pay them.鈥�
-----
Follow us on .
