More Tax Evaders Face New $5 K Fine
Unhappiness about the Iraq War is prompting more Americans to protest by not paying their taxes, even though a new law ups the ante for tax evasion from $500 to $5,000.
Despite the threat of criminal prosecution, reports AP, some 8,000 to 10,000 are protesting the war by refusing to pay part or all of their taxes, according to Ruth Benn, coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee in New York. “Clearly this year we definitely had more people calling, sending e-mails about how they decided to start resisting,” she says.
A mass tax-resistance campaign in April 2008 is being considered as a means of increasing pressure to end the war, she says. Although tax protesters–including Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century author of Walden–have been jailed, this rarely happens today.
