The Check Will Be In The Mail

We, in our post-modern, sophisticated society, scoff with gentle scorn at antiquated laws that remain on the books in various jurisdictions across this great land. We have all heard of various ordinances that strike us now as silly in this enlighted age. Prohibitions against wearing cowboy boots unless you own two cows (Blythe, CA), riding an ugly horse (Hartsville, IL) or pushing a moose out of a moving airplane (AK) are amusing but, in all liklihood, apocryphal. I tried to track down some of these old laws, and found that most website sources simply point to other websites, a victim of the giant echo chamber that is the interweb. In particular, the municipal codes of at least a couple of the communities that purportedly have these laws on the books appear to have excised those ordinances.

There is an old law, however, that has been on the books for a very long time, that long ago outlived its usefulness, and has effected all of us all of our lives. Even more interesting, it is a federal law, and the government has now decided to stop enforcing it. You probably know, if you examine your phone bills closely, that the government has been imposing a 3% tax on long distance telephone calls. What you may not realize is that the IRS code under which the tax was imposed was enacted in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. According to the TaxProf Blog, the law was enacted as a "luxury" tax on those few rich Americans who owned telephone (thank you for that progressive policy, Mr. McKinley). The IRS has recently lost a series of cases in Federal Court challenging the law, leading the IRS to formally abandon collection of the tax.

Here's the fun part: all taxpayers will receive a reimbursement of some as-yet-undetermined amount as part of our 2007 tax return, since the IRS is sitting on $15 billion of improperly assessed tax moneys. The reimbursement will be limited to a three year window due to the applicable statute of limitations. The IRS says that it will design a process that will be "simple and fair" that will not require all of us to dig through three years of phone records.

Sure, that seems reasonable. I trust that the IRS will be open, generous and fair. I can't wait to compare the resulting refund with my actual outlay of taxes, since I do keep my phone bills.

Never say the Bush administration didn't give you something.