One of my favorite books on the bookshelf is Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends, a paperback collection of Chicago newspaper columns by Mike Royko from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
You can get paperback copy on Amazon, but not at the price on the front-cover ($1.75). It’s currently going for about 8 bucks.
Royko was one of the most prolific – and provocative – columnists in newspaper history. He wrote over 7,500 columns in his four-decade-plus career. He was pretty focused on Chicago, yet his work was syndicated in more than 600 newspapers around the country.
In 1971, on April 18, Royko's column described some of his family’s experience with the US income tax. The column provides perspective for considering what can happen amidst a loss of confidence in government and the integrity of government finances.
The column is over 40 years old, but we have a recent country-wide example. Many people point to relatively widespread tax evasion as a reminder for Greek people to look in the mirror for some of the causes of their recent financial crisis.
The Greek people may have had some rational grounds / excuses for their behavior, however. If you don’t trust the system, and what the system is telling you they are doing with your money, you may not want to pay all of your taxes all of the time.
Royko, himself the son of a Polish mom and a Ukrainian dad, uses the term “self-defense” when describing his mother’s tax reporting practices.
The column below, and the Greek example in recent years, serve as good reminders to care about the integrity of government financial reporting in the US.
"Ma’s Quiet Tax Revolt"
Every April 15, when taxes are due, I think of my mother.
That probably sounds strange because most people think of their mothers at such times as Mother’s Day or Christmas.
I do that, too. But also on April 15 because long before anyone mentioned a “tax revolt,” my mother waged one.
She did it quietly, and nobody but her children knew about it, but she did it. For about 20 years, while earning a taxable income running her own small business, she didn’t pay a nickel of income tax.
She didn’t use loopholes. She wouldn’t have understood them.
Ma just didn’t bother to file a return all those years. She simply ignored the existence of the Internal Revenue Service.
I know that sounds like outright tax evasion, rather than tax revolt, but the distinction has to do with motive.
If a well-to-do person doesn’t pay because he wants two Cadillacs instead of one, that would be evasion.
But if there just isn’t enough for you and the government, that amounts to self-defense.
As my mother explained it:
“I need it more than the government does. Besides, they’d probably waste it anyway.”
You couldn’t argue with that. During many of those years, she supported her family in her tiny tailor shop, sitting at a sewing machine 12 hours a day, six days a week. And that brought in just enough to get by.
If she paid taxes, she would have had to work 14 hours a day. Enough is enough, Congressmen don’t work that hard, except when they are weaving new tax loopholes for the rich.
And none of the money was wasted. It was spent on the ingredients for large pots of soup, oil for the stove in the parlor, and repairs on the old Singer sewing machine. But if the government got it, it would just design another military transport plane that can’t fly.
As to the possibility that she would be caught and prosecuted, since it was a criminal offense, she said:
“I’ll tell them to put me in prison. If they won’t let me support myself, then they can support me.”
But she wasn’t caught, and now it is too late, so I can admit that Ma got away with a pretty good one.
And why not? We are told of millionaires who pay no income tax, thanks to loopholes created for them by Congress.
J. Paul Getty, one of the world’s richest men, is said to pay only $5,000 or so on an annual income of more than $50 million.
If true, Getty pays only one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of his income. My mother would have gladly paid under those terms. It would have amounted to about 30 cents.
The laws are so crafty that if a rich heiress puts $1 million into municipal bonds, she gets back about $50,000 a year – tax-free.
But if a scrub lady sweats to save $1,000 and puts it into a savings and loan, she gets aback about $50 a year, and has to share the $50 with the federal government.
The loopholes are for the rich. For the ordinary person, the loophole turns into a noose.
Despite this, we hear Treasury Sec. John Connally saying of tax reform: “It leaves me cold.” Then he launches a widely publicized crackdown on the storefront tax preparers. You bet, because they are cheating for the hand-to-mouth crowd. But there’s no crackdown on millionaires.
We hear the Vice President carp about a welfare mother chiseling an extra dollar or two, but he doesn’t say a word about the big real estate write-offs, oil depletion, and those who pay only one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth.
If the tax laws are reformed, it will amount to merely throwing a few crumbs in the direction of the ordinary worker. The cake will remain right where it is.
What this country needs, for genuine reform, are a few million people who had my mother’s attitude.
It is a foolish dream, of course, but let us imagine for a moment that a few million hard-pressed people said: “Sorry, there’s not enough for both of us, so put me in jail.”
The computers would catch them. But where would they find enough judges and prosecutors to try them?
And where would they find a jury of their peers to convict them? You would need a jury composed of J. Paul Gettys to find guilty a man who said:
“Sure, I didn’t pay taxes. I have to work two jobs to barely support my family. Go get it from H.L. Hunt.”
If that happened on a big scale, we would have tax reform, and we’d have it faster than you can say IT&T.
But it won’t happen, because few of us have enough courage. I got my check in on time, and I probably paid more than old man Getty. Ma would be ashamed of me.