It appears Americans are still funding the Spanish-American war effort. At least according to the Libertarian
Party web site, a tax levied on telephones in 1898 was designed to fund the Spanish-American war, but was never
recinded after the conclusion of the war. Today, that tax shows up as a federal telecommunications tax, and gets added
to the U.S. general fund.
Whoops.
Apparently Congress voted 420 to 2 to repeal the tax but it was vetoed by President Clinton for some reason.
Anyway, the Libertarians recommend that you should join their party
to defeat this tax. If you don't want to do that, you could just
switch to VoIP, which is currently immune to such
taxes.
1. It's a "luxury tax" also, because in 1898 telephone usage was a luxury, wonderful how they managed to keep that one around for more than 100 years.
Posted at 4:36AM on Dec 19th 2005 by n