Copyright 2000 The Buffalo News
The Buffalo News
June 6, 2000, Tuesday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE, Pg. 2B
LENGTH: 369 words
HEADLINE:
DEATH OF A TAX -- AGAIN
BODY:
It was a
historic step the House of Representatives took the other day, and not only
because it took 102 years to take it.
More than a century after Congress
enacted a 3 percent telephone excise tax to help pay for the Spanish-American
War, the House voted to repeal it. It may be the first time in the sorry history
of politics that any government in any nation on any of the known planets has
ever volunteered to eliminate a source of revenue. (Actually not, since this
very tax has been repealed twice before, only to come back as a more expensive
strain. It just goes to show.)
The matter now moves to the Senate, where
approval seems likely, and then to the White House, where fence-sitting is under
way.
It is long past time to do away with this levy, even though most
people will hardly notice it, with the tax accounting for just $ 2 on the
average monthly telephone bill of $ 69. But simply as a matter of political
honesty, and in light of bulging federal revenues, the government should be
willing to drop a tax that has outlived its purpose. Who knows? It might be
catching.
The telephone tax provides an object lesson
in the truth that, once enacted, taxes do not easily go away. This one is the
Rasputin of revenue-raisers, refusing to die.
Drafted in 1898, the levy
was originally a 1-cent luxury tax on the nation's 1,500 telephones. It was
repealed in 1902, only to be revived to help pay for World War I, repealed again
in 1924 and raised from the dead again in 1932. The rate fluctuated thereafter,
until 1990, when it was made permanent as a 3 percent tax, raising about $ 5
billion a year. Now it looks like it's about to make what taxpayers can only
hope is its final exit.
The problem is not that the tax is especially
onerous, it's just that the books are full of taxes that have outlived their
putative purposes.
So maybe this will be the start of something good.
Maybe Congress and the state legislatures and all the other levels of American
government will take this vote as a signal to undertake a thorough examination
of their tax laws and volunteer to eliminate those that have become unnecessary.
Just wipe 'em right off the books.
Right. Sure they will.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE:
June 8, 2000 
