Dissident Veteran For Peace

Here's an edited version of something I wrote to a Green Party list a couple of days ago:

I first looked into the Peace Tax Fund (PTF) legislation several years ago. While I believe the people working for the PTF have the best of motives nevertheless I think the effort is fatally misguided. The proposed legislation (currently H.R. 2631--the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act) might make individual taxpayers feel better but it would not divert one cent from the military budget until a highly unlikely, critical mass of the taxpayers participated in the PTF. The text of a previous version (H.R. 1186) of the bill claimed that two committees/studies determined that the bill, if passed, would INCREASE total federal revenues, presumably, because war tax resisters would begin paying their taxes. In Sec. 2, Para. 6 of the current bill, it says, "The Joint Committee on Taxation has certified that a tax trust fund, providing for conscientious objector taxpayers to pay their full taxes for non-military purposes, would increase Federal revenues." Until the large, critical mass is reached H.R. 2631 creates nothing but a shell game, at best. A higher proportion of tax revenues from non-PTF participants would simply be diverted to military spending to make up any loss.

Another serious criticism of PTF is that the law creating it would probably become another legal ax to wield against war tax resisters (although few of the legal defenses employed thus far have been very successful, in any event). By analogy, think of conscientious objectors (CO) to military conscription. In WWI (and probably other wars, too), some COs refused to do any alternative work that supported the war effort. They reasoned that their non-combat war work simply freed up someone else to perform the combat duty which they opposed and had been excused from. The CO laws were later used against these COs--the most 'conscientious' COs, in fact. They were sent to prison where they were often brutalized.

None of the advocates of the PTF I have corresponded with have ever addressed these concerns. Having said all that, I am humble enough to admit that my analysis and/or vision may be deficient and I would, however, support a well written Peace Tax Credit bill.

So, if passage of the Peace Tax Fund bill would--as it claims--increase federal revenues then why don't more members of Congress support it? My guess is that they don't want to give any credence to the notion that people have any right of conscience to decide individually how their taxes are spent. They may be afraid of the broader consequences of legislatively affirming "the religious freedom of taxpayers who are conscientiously opposed to participation in war ..." and they may also see the bill as a slippery slope opening the door to claims of conscience on subjects other than war.

Here are two other pieces I have written on war tax resistance:

• War Tax Resistance: An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . . Again? (CommonDreams.org April 12, 2002)
• If You Work for Peace, Stop Paying for War (CommonDreams.org March 21, 2003)

Labels: critical thinking, Peace Tax Fund Bill, politics, resistance, United States, war tax resistance