Word: deduction
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That first income tax law (rates: 3% on income of $600 or more, 5% on $10,000 or more) included a prophetic batch of exceptions, including a provision permitting every taxpayer to deduct a house rent allowance, whether he was a renter or not-a forerunner of many anomalous provisions to come...
Enforcement of the tax laws constantly involves the IRS and the Tax Court in absurdities, contradictions and quibbles. The IRS ruled that a Hollywood actress could deduct the cost of her expensive wardrobe on the ground that a movie star is required to look well-dressed; but, added the taxmen, she could not deduct the cost of undergarments, because the public did not see them. The Tax Court ruled that a particular taxpayer could deduct termite damage (not ordinarily deductible) as a casualty loss because the infestation was sudden; the Court thereby created an absurd anomaly by which...
...Court has permitted a taxpayer to deduct the cost of clarinet lessons for a child whose orthodontist recommended them, and a psychiatric patient got away with deducting automobile expenses because his psychiatrist prescribed driving as therapy. But the Court disallowed the cost of dancing lessons for a surgery patient, although a doctor recommended dancing for postoperative therapy. A taxpayer is permitted to deduct educational expenses if they enable him to keep his job, but not if they enable him to get a better job. A specialist in internal medicine, for example, was allowed to deduct the cost of psychoanalysis...
Roads of Avoidance. Of all the escape routes in the tax code, the one that rankles tax reformers most of all is the oil depletion allowance, which costs the Government well over a billion a year in taxes. The proprietor is permitted to deduct 27½% of the gross income from an oil property in figuring his tax-and he can keep doing that even after he has recovered his capital outlays. "It's the only law I can think of," says one Treasury source, "that allows a recovery in excess of the investment." Similar allowances apply to natural...
...president of Sanitary Farms Dairy, Erie, Pa., and his wife took a six-month African safari in 1950, with stops in Paris, London and Rome. The Tax Court permitted the firm to deduct $16,443 for costs of the trip on the ground that it constituted legitimate "advertising...