Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up Daniel Jenkins’s appeal which asserted his claim of a Constitutional right to conscientious objection to military taxation. (I covered this appeal in some depth back in June.)

This effectively upholds the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which upheld the Tax Court ruling, which more-or-less said “no dice, and here’s a $5,000 frivolous filing penalty for making me say so.”

Remember how the IRS planned to refund all of that $40 billion or so of long-distance telephone excise tax it had been incorrectly collecting all those years?

Actually, they kind of fudged on that. They said they would only refund that portion of the tax they’d been illegally collecting for the past three years: about $15 billion.

But they plan they came up with — letting people take a credit on their 2006 1040 forms — was one that they estimated would only give back $8 billion.

Well, it turns out that their estimates were a bit off. They only returned about $3.8 billion, and only refunded anything at all to about half of those people who were eligible.

This new figure comes from a new report from TIGTA.

Thanks to History Carnival for plugging The Picket Line.