NO BUCK, NO BANG

...Now I do not advise you, or anyone, to refuse to pay your, or his, or her, taxes...

...I speak of years and/or thousands of dollars...

...It isn't just the principle of the thing, it's the principle and the nickel...

...They seemed to have yellowed out...

...And the harasser has brought the matter of buying war to the attention of Sylvia Hogaboom and who knows how many more publicans, and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts en route...

...The more wars there are to end war, the more wars there are...

...You are wanted at the cash register...

...and to Representative Leon Panetta (who goes to bat for him with the IRS, spreading the word still further, and gets himself very politely rebuffed...

...He has turned over his current records to me, beginning with the IRS Document Locator Number in his tax case...

...Up to now the customary civil penalty for late filing, plus 12 per cent per annum interest on the unpaid amount (which rose to 20 per cent on February 1), has satisfied the tax-gatherers (known scornfully to Christ as the publicans...

...The reason I don't is that I am a timid man and I do not want to end up in the pokey, and one of these days the courts are going to decide that tax refusal is no more nor less than tax evasion—a nice point, the lawyers say...

...The idea, as anMilton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, has been a tax refuser since 1948...

...In that case it will be punishable by five and/or ten (or ten and/or five, I forget which...

...Married her for her money (which, it turned out...

...she had in her coin purse...

...The bill is sponsored by Senators Mark Hatfield and Mike Gravel and thirty-some House members...

...The ten days passed, then ten weeks, then another ten weeks, and nothing further was heard from the IRS on that subject...

...Damn the torpedoes," he said to Mrs...

...Murgatroyd had been harassing the G, and the G, in going after him on the 1979 phony, was harassing him back...

...It is a poor world, and a poor country, so poor that it can not care for its needy, and half your tax money goes into production for the prevention of use, into a grinder which, as General Eisenhower put it, "necessarily must feed on the energy, productivity, and brainpower of the country, and if it takes too much, our total strength declines...

...Murgatroyd was downhearted, especially at having to face his red-white-and-blue boss when his salary or wages were levied upon...

...You can't win...

...JG521-JG321-RIF47-9217...

...True, the G loses only in the short run...

...The more victorious wars there are for democracy, the less democracy there is...

...A Californian, Murgatroyd spreads the word by sending copies of his April 15 letter to President Reagan (who doesn't answer...

...Then you are bodysnatched, tossed a gun, and instructed to kill as many men as you can who have never offended you and who are under the same obligation with respect to you...

...other years he refused to pay 25 per cent of the tax and had it taken from him by force, violence, and other lawful means...

...The Legislature of the Quaker Colony of Pennsylvania, 1709 Every mother's meatball knows that war runs into big bucks...

...And the Seattle leaders of the Lutheran, United Methodist, and United Presbyterian churches and the United Church of Christ stood publicly with him...

...She proved to be made of the stuff decathlon champs are made of, and she'll wrestle anyone in the house for that tax money...

...M., the companion of his sorrows, to pony up $217.36, this being 25 per cent of his 1980 tax...

...Now it's as, or like, I say: Murgatroyd (if that's his name) is a man of spirit...

...to Senator Slumbering Sam Hayakawa (whose computer replies with an imbecile and irrelevant letter about high taxes...

...Some years he had no taxable income at all and sent a letter with his return saying what he would do if he had...

...Murgatroyd, a busy man, proceeded to abandon his business and hunt for, find, and try to sort out his 1979 "papers...

...She took Murgatroyd, she reminds him when he falters in his resolve, for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, "and," she adds, "in peace and in war...

...downhearted, but not out...

...This took a busy week, and he discovered that he had reported, under Profit or Loss from Business or Profession, every penny of the income the IRS listed as unreported Other Income...

...You may holler as loud as you want, agitate, fulminate, demonstrate, and flabbergast, just so you come up with the dime...

...The word is spreading...

...All I'm saying is that April 15 is the day you buy or you don't...

...If, however, you are superannuated, spavined, windbroke, or a healthy young woman (liberated or unliberated), you are too frail for the field of honor...

...I admire him extravagantly, more than any man I know...

...This time the boom was lowered...

...Past, present, and future wars consume 50 per cent-plus of your income tax...

...it has only to raise the tax rate on the harasser (and on everyone else) or inflate the currency (and rob the harasser, and everyone else, at the checkout counter) to compensate for the national deficit the harasser's shenanigans induced...

...If you fail to follow instructions on the field of honor, you are stood up before a hit squad of six of your own buddies and shot in the chest...

...This Murgatroyd is a whimsical wight...

...At least," he says, "I don't hand it over when they say, 'Hand it over.' I make them come and get it...

...What the IRS ordinarily does, after that ten-day final warning, is get a distraint warrant against the harasser, or, more precisely, against his money...

...Murgatroyd insists that he feels better for performing what he insists is a merely symbolic act, and that's enough...

...Now Murgatroyd is a small taxpayer—about 5' 8"—and he had been harassing the IRS for years in the matter of taxes for war...

...and signed personally by one Sylvia Hogaboom, Problem Resolution Technician, Reply to NJ:NN:N-STOP 3871-40063977...

...A few years ago an assemblage representing heavyweights of the three historic peace churches, the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Quakers, called upon their congregations and church agencies to "seriously consider refusal to pay the military portion of their Federal taxes as a response to Christ's call to radical discipleship...

...It's a little different, of course, if you are of military, or murdering, age...

...Men are a dime a dozen...

...20008, for more nitty bolts and gritty nuts in this matter...

...On April 15, 1981, this Murgatroyd, having bought more war than he had any use for, whimsically declined, jointly with Mrs...

...He is 47-13-0206-76248-1, a.k.a...

...You continue to say, and I hasten to agree, that it makes no great difference in a military budget of $200 billion if you or I refuse to hand over a nickel, but in the year 1756, while timid Quakers like me and rough-rider Quakers like Murgatroyd were debating the niceties of the issue, one Joshua Evans, olov hasholom, told the Yearly Meeting that he would not pay the war tax, "and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I consider, is made of many drops...

...The United States of America, in the person of Director, IRS, was trying to rob Winthrop Shapiro Murgatroyd...

...But I'm the quiet kind...

...to Senator Alan Cranston (who is continually running for reelection and doesn't have time to answer...

...M. had sent to Director, IRS, on April 15, diffidently explaining to Director why they weren't buying...

...He replied to the publicans, as he had to each and every of their previous notices, warnings, and threats (and billets-doux from Sylvia Hogaboom), by sending a polite photocopy of the original letter he and Mrs...

...Forrest by name, put it, is to get there the fastest with the mostest...

...He is married to a beautiful buzz-saw of a woman...

...As Milt Gross used to say, Is diss a system...

...They counsel courageous men and women of taxpaying age, and they have a bill in both houses of Congress providing for a trust fund to permit the use of the military portion of taxes for nonmilitary purposes...

...Of course they get the tribute money, and more—in the end...

...Fair enough," said Murgatroyd to Mrs...

...If I were looking for trouble, as I'm not, I would get in touch with the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund, at 2111 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, D.C...

...Once he sued the G to get it back, and the G's judge said to his lawyer, Attorney Francis Heisler, "Is your client aware that if this court should hold for him, the court itself would be laying the axe to the root of all established government...

...You can't be too careful these days about what you say, or to whom, now that the CIA is into domestic destabilization...

...This is called making the world safe for democracy...

...I will confess to being distantly acquainted with a man whose present whereabouts and whenabouts I deny knowing and whose very name I can't remember rightly...

...What is wanted of the taxpayer is the dime to buy a dozen men with...

...The Murgatroyds—the IRS sexists used only his Social Security number— were informed that enforcement action, after ten days, might include a levy upon "salaries or wages due you," "bank accounts, receivables, commissions," "property or rights to property such as automobiles," and so on...

...M., forgetting that they were his torpedoes...

...But you didn't expect to...

...and Attorney Heisler replied, "I think he is, your honor...

...Call him Winthrop Shapiro Murgatroyd...

...I am careful to say that if you decide that it is contrary to your principles to hire men to kill one another, remember it wasn't 1 but the Quaker legislature of Pennsylvania that said it in 1709...

...The bigger the buck, the bigger the bang, and, conversely, no buck, no bang...

...other general, N.B...

...By September 4, 1981, Big Brother, having written him many a computerized billet-doux, progressively phrased in harder and harder terms ("Dear Sir, You Cur"), calculated his cumulative indebtedness at $217.36 plus Late Payment Penalty and Interest for a total of $232.22...

...No more letters beginning, "While we appreciate...

...Blood is the milk of old men, and in the self-evident view of these Reagans there is no such thing as too much...

...M. "If, like Socrates, you are going to be a gadfly stinging the steed of the State, you have got to expect the State to slip you a little hemlock once in a while...

...But then something was heard on another subject: Murgatroyd's 1979 tax return, in which, he was informed, he had not reported four or five thousand dollars of Other Income...

...So if you don't want a war, you don't buy it, and then you don't have a war...

...And last summer the Catholic Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle called for unilateral disarmament and said that citizens should refuse to pay 50 per cent of their income tax...

...He was sternly, if regretfully, informed on that cumulative occasion that he had ten days to kick in...

...Murgatroyd is a lucky man, one of the luckiest...

...He didn't want to haggle over percentages...

...But it costs them a tidy bundle to fodder all those Sylvia Hoga-booms and regurgitate the harasser for Problem Resolution when he doesn't glide noiselessly though the computer's digestive system...