It Begins — Activists Launch Movement To Make Taxation Voluntary

A groundbreaking new organization proposes multiple compelling arguments in answer to one of the most pivotal questions of our time:

What if the Government had to earn your money?

If it did — if everything from education to healthcare, law enforcement to charitable giving, to even the sacred social safety nets and retirement programs — it would function in your best interests, the Tax Revolution Institute contends, since the inane bureaucratic nightmare that is the current government strangles all semblance of efficacy from the system.

What the Institute, in actuality, candidly asks, is for individuals to step back and assess,

Is the government you fund through coercive taxation worth the price you pay?

“What if you could redirect your tax dollars whenever you saw them wasted by a government department; spent in support of a policy that does more harm than good; paid out to cronies for supporting a particular politician or campaign, or just deployed much less efficiently than by a local charity or non-profit that does a particular government job better than the government does it?” the Institute’s website asks.

Further, considering how mired in its present state of odious inertia this superfluously bureaucratic State has become — and in light of resistance to drastic, immediate change — do smaller reforms to the current tax system even offer a viable solution?

What if private organizations, non-profits, religious institutions, businesses, wealthy individuals, volunteers, and cooperatives provided assistance better befitting entrepreneurs, laborers, the impoverished, the jobless, teachers, the houseless, innovators, or anyone with a specific or general need — without costing taxpayers hard-earned income they’d rather not allocate for such programs?

At present, an insidious web of laws, regulations, endowments, subsidies, and other rules and perks has so infected the administrative structure of the government, its most efficient function is interagency back-patting. But, stripping the red tape from a foundation will do little to improve mushrooming social issues that might otherwise be alleviated by a dynamic network unassociated with the State.

A sizeable segment of readers probably raised eyebrows or rolled eyes at the mere suggestion private entities could be motivated by anything other than greed — or that the desire to amass wealth is inherently devoid of compassion — but the Tax Revolution Institute arrived on its mission by investigating societal issues through the lens of skepticism.

Before discussing a number of impressive solutions — many already functioning full steam ahead, sans interference — it’s necessary to understand the coercive nature of taxation, itself.

Because forcible taxation allows the State to allot your money as it deems fit — regardless of a program’s efficiency, effectiveness, quality, or results — and you have no recourse for misallocated funds. Your money will be spent — you just don’t have a say so.

Besides rampant corruption facilitated by decision-making for the many concentrated in the hands of the few — and the accessibility that concentration provides mega-corporations and monied interests — the tax system diverts charitable funds as a middleman before the money reaches its target.

“Since people cannot send their tax money elsewhere,” the Institute’s website states, “organizations that would address social needs more effectively or efficiently than government agencies are either underfunded or never see the light of day. Moreover, that lack of competition prevents us from fairly judging the effectiveness of government solutions against all of the better solutions we’ve been prevented from having, so the quality of those government solutions falls unchecked.”

Where businesses and charities not tied to the government must deliver quality services to satisfy funders and compete with similar organizations — primarily by cutting waste and reducing inefficiency — government agencies, saddled with a steady and ever-increasing influx of funding, aren’t beholden to pragmatism. Government bookkeeping is a notorious fiasco.

Of all the kinks in the tax system as it exists today — an expansive list that could subsume countless volumes — the issue, at its core, is the lack of voice taxpayers have in the spending of their income.

However, the Institute posits,

“If you could redirect those tax dollars, the result would be revolutionary: there would finally be an incentive – indeed, a need – for politicians and public servants to clean house, to make sure that your tax dollars were doing justly and effectively what they were taken from you to do.”

There are solutions.

Our tax system is deemed voluntary — for now, in name, alone. Taking that description to heart, a truly voluntary tax system offers an unending plethora of options for channeling your money the way you see fit. For example, the Institute suggests,

“That could mean choosing not to fund corrupt agencies; it could mean diverting money to charitable programs that outperform government programs; it could mean directing money from pet political projects to the fundamental needs of your community.

“Putting choice into our system is the only way to ensure better services, delivered more efficiently and more accountably, to the people whose wellbeing is the only reason for taking their tax dollars in the first place.”

Although the idea might be difficult in a nation whose recalcitrance drowns out the loudest call for sweeping reforms, wresting your own money from the State’s bureaucratic and regulatory quagmire and directing it to programs of your choice hardly constitutes radical engagement.

In fact, that sentiment can be reduced to a single, virtually indisputable idea:

“The tax system should serve the people,” the Tax Revolution Institute asserts, “and not the other way around.”

How to make that reality — as seen in the number of groups already subverting the ailing system — will be a pleasant surprise discussed in Part Two of this two-part series.

And as the Institute points out, the issue of taxation and inefficiency has nothing at all to do with partisan politics, rather,

“This is emphatically not a political project. It is a human one, and it is a humane one.”

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Elderly Couple Evicted, Thrown Out on the Street, for Failing to Pay Property Taxes on Their Home

Albion, ME — Maine Governor Paul LePage wants to rewrite the law after becoming incensed at the plight of an elderly, disabled couple — one of whom is a veteran — who were evicted from their home of 33 years because they are too impoverished to pay taxes.

According to the Portland Press Herald, in December 2015, the town of Albion moved to foreclose on the “rundown camp” of National Guard and Marine veteran Richard Sukeforth and his wife, Leonette, when taxes went unpaid.

Then, the town put the couple’s home up for auction — it sold for just $6,500 — and the new owner, Jason Marks, kicked the two 80-year-olds to the curb last week.

LePage is irate — and wants to ensure this can never happen again.

“He’s living in poverty,” he said of Richard in an interview with the Morning Sentinel. “Now, we’re throwing him out on the street. That’s just awful.”

“I’m livid about it,” LePage asserted of the ‘legal’ but seemingly unscrupulous eviction, “and I think we have to have laws to protect our most vulnerable.”

LePage appealed to nonprofit Pine Tree Legal — an advocacy group providing free legal advice for Maine residents with limited income — but, it turns out, the eviction followed the letter of the law.

As the Sentinel reports,

“LePage said he thinks it is immoral that a veteran and his sick, bedridden wife, who are at the end of their lives, were kicked out of their home and he is going to fight to ensure the practice is prohibited in the future.”

As he explained in the interview,

“I’m going to ask for an ombudsman to mediate disputes between communities and taxpayers, not just elderly. I want to change the foreclosure law as it relates to poverty, and one of the things I want to do is force them (communities) to sell property at market value and any revenues above taxes and revenue and foreclosure fees go back to the original owner.”

Typically, Maine communities work with disadvantaged citizens to solve tax difficulties — through tax abatement and reverse mortgages, for example — in order to avoid evictions like the Sukeforths experienced.

“As mayor of Waterville,” LePage explained of his position prior to becoming governor of Maine, “whenever we had an issue of poverty, we never threw people out.”

While the town of Albion indeed followed the law, as far as morals are concerned, LePage remarked, “What they did is unbelievable. It’s just not the way it’s done.”

Before the Sukeforths were evicted from property, located on Lovejoy Pond, Leonette — a retired nurse with diabetes — had been confined to a hospital bed under doctor’s orders. Now, the elderly pair has been forced to live with daughter, Yvette Ingalls, in a trailer park in Holden, where a nurse attends Leonette on a daily basis.

According to the Sentinel, daughter-in-law Rachel Sukeforth and son Rick had to essentially rescue the ailing couple in the middle of a snowstorm on the night the new owner kicked them off the property. They’ve had to temporarily house the couple’s beloved Jack Russell terrier and black cat since the trailer park does not allow dogs.

Richard questions the morality of the eviction, telling the outlet in a phone interview,

“That deal was very underhanded. I don’t care what anybody says. It weren’t right. They came down and evicted us when my wife was right in a hospital bed. We’re both 80 years old, so they done it and got away with it and they’re happy.”

An attorney for LePage attempted to negotiate with Marks, the new owner, but was told it would have to take place in his own lawyer’s office with his attorney present. LePage says he prefers to combat corruption as directly as possible, and did not want attorneys involved in such a discussion.

“I never meet with lawyers,” he explained, adding he’d planned to ask Marks to allow the Sukeforths to live out their lives on the property they’d inhabited for over three decades. “When I ask for a meeting, it’s me, alone. When I go after corruption, I go after corruption head-on. I don’t need any help.”

Marks agreed to allow the Sukeforths to continue to reside at the camp as long as they paid rent — but says they never did. He explained he had no choice but to force them out, and is being unfairly portrayed as the bad guy in this controversy.

Town officials stand by the eviction — saying they attempted to work with Richard for several years and that the back taxes were minimal. Albion Selectwoman Beverly Bradstreet owed $4,000 in property taxes for the dilapidated building and the land more accurately described as a camp.

“It’s three years before we foreclose, and we paid his taxes, like two different years to avoid foreclosure,” Bradstreet told the Sentinel, “but then he just let it go. He knew that we were going to do it. He would come in the Town Office, but he did not pay. I don’t know why. He just waited until it was too late. We foreclosed last December, 2015. We gave him six months to still pay it off and he made no effort to pay it off. He didn’t try, and there were other people in town that could use some help, too.”

While that seems a justifiable reason for the town to act, Rachel says no one in the Sukeforth family was aware her father-in-law — who has begun to suffer from dementia — had failed to pay. In fact, when asked, the veteran had affirmed he’d visited the Town Office and paid the bill.

A notice printed in a local paper announcing the auction of the property first alerted family members to the dubious situation.

“As soon as we found this out, we called the Town Office,” Rachel told the Sentinel. “My husband and siblings and our neighbor all tried to pay the taxes up to date, and they refused payment. This wasn’t sitting well with any one of us. Every town has the right to refuse payment, but can also accept the payment as well. When we tried to pay selectmen, they said when an auction is posted in the newspaper, they can no longer accept payment, but that wasn’t true.”

That refusal to accept payment from other parties doesn’t sit well with the family and concerned neighbors — nor does it with the governor.

“It’s never too late until the deed transfers, and the deed had not transferred,” said LePage, who has even offered to take the couple’s dog, Pee-wee, if they are unable to have the canine designated as a service animal to allow the dog to reside the trailer park.

“Richard Sukeforth said he and his wife receive $1,252 a month in Social Security payments. He worked in construction during the summer for many years, operated a snowplow for the Maine Turnpike in winter and later worked for Bath Iron Works until he was injured when he fell off a crane boom in 1982, he said,” the Sentinel reports.

Neighbors, family, and friends took umbrage at the seemingly callous eviction of such a frail and kind family from the property they loved — particularly given Richard’s mental state and that several people tried in vain to make good on the taxes owed.

“He is a … vet. There’s just so many reasons this shouldn’t be able to happen,” said part-time neighbor MaryAnn Sawlan-Neiman, who alerted the governor to the tragic situation after exhausting all other options.

“Every day, he would come down, stay a couple of hours, and I’d go to his house,” Sawlan-Neiman said of Richard. “We just became really good friends. Another neighbor told me in July they were going to foreclose for taxes. I went to the town hall and I said, ‘What does he owe? I’ll pay for it right now.’”

But by that time, Albion officials said, the public announcement meant the tax bill could not be addressed by anyone —  and the town refused to work with even Governor LePage, himself, to halt the eviction.

“It’s just devastating for them,” lamented Sawlan-Neiman of the Sukeforths, adding, of Richard, “He’s just like a lost man now.”

And there you have it. A couple, who owed no one anything, had their home stolen from them by government because they failed to pay the state an extortion fee for their right to live —  and we still call this place the Land of the Free.