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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Free at last

Finally, we can put the Spanish-American War behind us and move on with our lives:

The Treasury Department and IRS announced this morning that after losing in five circuit courts of appeals, the Government is throwing in the towel and will no longer seek to enforce the 3% excise tax on long-distance telephone calls enacted during the Spanish-American War of 1898 as a "luxury" tax on wealthy Americans who owned telephones.  The IRS will will issue $15 billion in refunds to consumers for long-distance telephone service taxes paid over the past three years. . .

Comments

Mike Kole
Sat, 05/27/2006 - 4:39am

The War is now over? Hurrah!

This item is one that Libertarians had routinely cited to bolster the idea that there is nothing quite so permanent as a temporary tax... or that yesterday's luxury items (telephones!) are today's staples, so the average person ends up paying the tax just as surely as the wealthy it was intended to soak.

Sunset provisions, good.

Mike Sylvester
Sun, 05/28/2006 - 2:53pm

I am certainly happy that this "temporary luxury" tax was removed after 108 years...

As many of you know my wife and I run a local Public Accounting Firm and prepare a few hundred tax returns each year.

I hope the IRS does something simple for this tax rebate. I certainly doubt that they will; but, I hope so.

Realize the IRS has no idea how much each taxpayer has paid on this tax. This is especially true of both large and small businesses.

Expect this to become a HUGE problem...

The best case for us is that the IRS will come up with a simple formula each person and business can use to ESTIMATE the actual phone taxes paid. There is no way each person will get a rebate equal to the actual amount they paid.

We all need to hope that lobyists and politicians stay out of this...

I am looking forward to seeing what the IRS does...

Mike Sylvester

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