Some rules are made to be broken
There's an old saying in "flyover country" that once the government puts a toll on a bridge, it's impossible to get the tolls booths removed. Apparently, we've just won a small victory on the bridge to the 20th 21st century.
The Treasury Department, conceding that it has no right to continue collecting a 108-year-old tax on long-distance telephone calls, announced Thursday that it will drop its legal fight for the tax and instead refund as much as $13 billion to callers who have paid the tax in the past three years.At this rate, we should have the Social Security mess fixed just in time for the American tricentennial. Good thing the Senate is requiring illegal aliens to pay some of their back taxes... though one wonders if, before they get their new "earned citizenship", they're only going to be 3/5th of a person.The 3 percent tax, enacted in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War and revised in 1965, has been declared illegal by five federal courts of appeal during the past year as the result of challenges brought by companies forced to pay it.
