Grover Norquist’s successful tax-slashing lobbing group Americans for Tax Reform is trying to get rid of the federal phone excise tax.
This phone tax has long been associated with war — it was enacted to fund the Spanish-American war and was raised to help pay for both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the military build-up of . For this reason, war tax resisters in particular have targeted this tax.
But I’ll be surprised if the war tax resistance movement joins up with Americans for Tax Reform to try to get rid of the tax. For one thing, they’d have to hold their noses to align themselves with a right-winger like Norquist, since they’re mostly lefties themselves.
But also, because resisting the phone tax is such an easy and risk-free way to play at tax resistance without having to become too committed to it, the war tax resistance movement has become weirdly dependent on that tax. Some tax resisters don’t have it in them to do any more than phone tax resistance — if there were no phone tax, what would those tax resisters do instead?
A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would abolish the tax. It currently has 137 co-sponsors.
