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Abstract

Extraordinary medical expenses— whether due to a one-time occurrence or a chronic condition— happen on their own time. These expenses, their causes, and their consequences (medical, personal, financial, or all of these) can rarely be neatly cabined into a single calendar year. Treatment requiring an expensive prescription medication or complex surgery not covered by insurance may address a condition that arose over years. That condition may have interfered with a taxpayer’s ability to work in prior years, the current year, and perhaps for years to come, even for the rest of the taxpayer’s earning life. The medical condition of a taxpayer’s family member can do the same. The disruptions caused by these events may be so radical as to transport the person, as it were, into “crip time,” an experience of time radically different than the norm. Or it may not. But regardless, the Internal Revenue Code as it currently operates does not even fairly reflect the economic reality, and it deprives many taxpayers who have large medical expenses of the full tax value of those expenditures. It discriminates even more acutely against those who have such expenses over many years, and it discriminates irrationally, on the basis of those expenses’ timing.

We all live in normative time. Or rather, we all live under it—under a regime structured by it—seemingly inescapably. Philosophers dating back at least to Immanuel Kant have reflected on the nature of time, as a necessary condition of apperception, seeking to account for how and why all our human experiences necessarily take place in time. But it has taken the work of some radical disability theorists, practitioners of self-described “crip theory,” to identify the concept of normative time, by distinguishing it from what some of them call “crip time.” It is normative time that regulates our industrialized world, and our academic world. It puts us on daily, weekly, monthly schedules, creates class times with strictly regulated starting and ending times, same for semesters, academic years, time to degree, time to tenure. . . . The tax year, too, is a paradigmatic example of “normative time”—fixed, regular, intersubjective, arbitrary, frequently unfair, justified, perhaps, by convenience— but whose?

When (and why) might departures from normative time be justified? The essence of this proposal is rejecting the so-called “ineluctab[ility] of the integrity of the taxable year”4—its normative dimension— in the service of greater substantive fairness and as a first effort to bring the provocative idea of “crip temporality” (also called “crip time”) into the tax Code. The first part of this proposal argues that this change can be justified on grounds of equity and economic reality before turning to justifications more deeply grounded in disability theory.

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