Law Commons^™

The Case Against The Debt Tax, Vijay Raghavan

Fordham Law Review

Americans are increasingly agitating for debt relief. In the last decade, there have been national campaigns to cancel student debt, credit card debt, and mortgage debt. These national campaigns have paralleled local efforts to cancel taxi medallion debt, carceral debt, and lunch debt. But as the public increasingly pursues broad-scale debt relief outside bankruptcy, they face an important institutional obstacle: canceled debt is generally taxable.

The taxability of canceled debt is often raised by opponents as an objection to broad debt cancellation and potentially discounts the value of any debt relief. The conventional account for why we tax canceled debt …