April 15th is “Support the Pentagon” Day

A full-page ad from the 22 March 1970 New York Times:

The copy reads:

April 15^th Is “Support the Pentagon” Day

We are being income-taxed and sales-taxed and excise-taxed until there is nothing left to be squeezed out of us.

Yet, the most vital public services all around us are on the verge of collapse. Because “there is no money.”

Where on earth is the money going?

You know where.

It’s being used to pay for war — past, present and future. $201,000,000 a day for Vietnam and for so-called national defense. Another $71,700,000 a day for the interest on our war-connected debt and for veteran’s expenses. 64% of all the taxes we pay to the Federal Government (excluding “trust fund” taxes, such as social security).

To say nothing of our 48,000 sons killed in Vietnam. And 269,000 wounded, many of them crippled for life.

To say nothing of the deep unrest among the young and the blacks.

To say nothing of the inflation that has cheated our people out of so much of their life’s savings, and which, on top of the taxes, is sapping them of the will to work.

The military-industrial establishment is like a giant tapeworm that is sucking the nourishment out of the body of America.

We cannot let this go on.

On April 15^th, there is going to take place a nationwide taxpayer’s protest against the war in Vietnam, and for an end to military overspending. It is sponsored by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee.

If you’re tired of working to support “them,”

If you’re tired of being treated with contempt by “them,”

If you realize we’re never going to get “them” off our taxpaying backs unless we organize,

Then be there on April 15^th.

Join the nationwide tax protest on April 15^th

Not much talk of tax resistance itself in this ad, nor of the responsibility taxpayers had for the war, but it represents a good attempt to cast taxpayers as additional victims of militarism.

The New York Times carried this international-news-in-brief notice on this day in 1884:

Mr. Parnell’s new policy, that the farmers of Ireland refuse to pay the police tax imposed under the Crimes act, is receiving fervent practical approval in Ireland. The corporations of Limerick and Cork lead the way in opposing the tax. Limerick declines to submit to a mandamus directing the payment of the extra police quartered there by the former magistrate, Mr. Clifford Lloyd, and Cork refuses money for Capt. Plunkett’s reinforcements. The United Ireland, of which Mr. William O’Brien, member of Parliament, is editor, in an article indicating the line of resistance, says: “If the authorities at the Castle want blood money or a police tax let them send policemen to lift it. Then, if the people take advice from Cobden and Mr. Bright, they will enter upon a fiscal revolt and show England the impolicy of punishing thousands of innocent people for the sins of the few guilty.”

From the Spokane Daily Chronicle on this day in 1968:

Washington (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service has ordered its tax collection offices to attach the paychecks of persons who refuse to pay the 10 per cent federal tax on their telephone bills as a protest against the Vietnam war.

A survey of large telephone companies indicated that about 3,000 persons have adopted this technique. The phone companies do not cut off service to the protesters but simply notify the IRS offices that the tax is unpaid.

An IRS spokesman said that the amounts are small — usually less than a dollar on each phone bill — but that collection must be made. The Washington office therefore has directed district and local collectors to attach the pay or file liens.