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Taxing Your Tears: Section 104(A)(2) And The Real Reason To Cry, Richard Cameron Gower

Richard Cameron Gower

For nearly a century the federal government has been taxing the income of its citizens. For almost as long, it has been exempting damages paid in tort suits from that tax. Nonetheless, scholars cannot agree as to why the exemption should exist. Many justifications have been proposed but they all fail to rationalize the personal injury exemption. After considering and dismissing a variety of justifications for the personal injury tort exemption, this Article considers the sympathy-based rationale for the exemption, which claims that personal physical injury plaintiffs deserve favorable tax treatment because of their sympathetic situations. Though personal physical injury …