From the Bend, Oregon Bulletin, :
Folksinger again will refuse to pay income taxes
St. Louis, Mo. (UPI) — Folksinger Joan Baez will withhold her entire income tax this year because “83 per cent of the tax money goes to armaments.”
Miss Baez acknowledged at a news conference that the government will take the money from the bank and that she will wind up paying more because of penalties.
But she said her stand, “is turning a tax collector into a tax collector. There’s a difference in my paying and their taking. It’s called confiscation.”
Miss Baez and her husband, David Harris, arrived here for a concert night at Washington University and a lecture on draft resistance at the university chapel.
The singer, who held a pink rose in one hand, said her most recent recording is her favorite because it is most outspokenly antiwar. She argued that nonviolence is the only road to brotherhood because “the ends don’t justify the means. The means are the ends.”
Miss Baez said, “We all want a world of peace and brotherhood, but we’re the smaller group because we don’t want to bonk anyone on the head on the way there.”
Neither Miss Baez nor her husband believe that presidential politics have the potential to lift the country towards greater brotherhood.
Miss Baez said, “I don’t believe my kind of work will allow me to take time out to vote for a man who is the lesser of five or six evils. If a man wants to do the best he can for the nation, he will be doing the least for humanity.”
Harris said Sen. Robert Kennedy, D-N.Y., “has compiled all the rhetoric of the dissenting young people but none of the substance.
“His kind of politics is more dangerous, perhaps, than the kind we’re in now.”
