INTRODUCTION

The Census Bureau estimates that at the end of 1994, approximately 54,000,000 Americans (over 20% of the U.S. population) had some type of disability; 26,000,000, a severe disability. Since that time, the U.S. population has both grown and aged; the number of people with disabilities is therefore probably larger today. The Code contains numerous discrete and largely uncoordinated provisions dealing with or of particular relevance to people with disabilities. Yet so far as we have been able to ascertain, no serious academic analysis of the policy issues underlying the U.S. taxation of people with disabilities or of those who interact most closely with them has ever been published. Disability and tax scholars, each largely ignorant of the others' specialties, appear for the most part to have avoided the subject. This is regrettable. Tax rules of particular relevance to people with disabilities are too important for disability specialists to ignore in assessing federal disability policy. Conversely, the problems of people with disabilities raise issues that go to the heart of income tax theory and policy.

Disability theory has changed markedly over the past century. The early 1900s saw the replacement of an affliction paradigm, in which disability was viewed as a punishment or test imposed by God, with a medical/charity paradigm, in which people with disabilities came to be viewed instead as appropriate objects of pity and philanthropy. The result was the enactment of a wide variety of special programs to help Americans with disabilities.