Keep the Change.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Some will use tax refund to protest Bush tax policy

My Republican brother-in-law has been gloating all summer about the tax rebate: "I suppose you're sending yours back to the government," he says sarcastically. Those $300 and $600 checks now arriving in the mail are a triumph, the Bushies believe, because they prove that Americans, given half a chance, will take free money over abstract, pinko notions like the collective good. The tax rebate makes Republicans out of all of us.

Maybe everyone has a price. But surely not all of us are ready to go that cheap--kissing off clean air and water, public transit, and decent schools for $300. Goaded by my brother-in-law's challenge, I decided to find out what other people are doing with the money.

Sally Arnold, an elementary school teacher in Santa Cruz, California, is one of the thousands of people who have been deluging the offices of United for a Fair Economy in Boston and other social justice organizations with calls, eager to join a grassroots effort to do something constructive with the tax rebate.

"There's this feeling of impotence, like, `Don't say you're doing this as a gift for me!' "says Arnold, who is particularly dismayed by the problems she sees in her cash-strapped public school. "I don't know about Washington, but here in California there are still a lot of problems the government could address. One of my friends was saying the money they're giving away could be used to put solar panels on every public building."

After sitting around her living room with a half dozen "mutually outraged" friends, Arnold and the others decided to organize a protest and give their rebates away.

"We're just average pissed-off people. We might not be able to undo this whole terrible tax shift, but a least we could make a public statement," she says. "So I called United for a Fair Economy to learn how to do it and get some guidance." Spurred by Arnold and others, United for a Fair Economy and its spin-off organization, Responsible Wealth, created the web site http://www.rejecttherebate.org to organize a protest and start a "Reject the Rebate" petition. "We had to pull things together quickly, because we were getting so many calls," says Molly Lanzarotta of Responsible Wealth.

Visitors to the web site have three choices of where to send their rebate checks: 1) to groups working to promote greater tax fairness; 2) to local organizations that provide social services for citizens left behind by the economic boom; 3) back to the federal government.

"These...