'The last thing you should have to think about when you have lost a spouse to war is taxation. And yet for Gold Star spouses now facing a tax hike they didn't expect, it's probably hard to think of anything else,' writes Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, CNNOpinion
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of"Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield." Her next book, upcoming for Penguin Press, is set in northeastern Syria. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.
The last thing you should have to think about when you have lost a spouse to war is taxation. And yet for Gold Star spouses now facing a tax hike they didn't expect, it's probably hard to think of anything else. Gayle Tzemach LemmonThe tax increase came about inadvertently because of what is called the"Kiddie Tax," a provision that was part of the 2017 tax cuts. As the military publication Task & Purpose, which first reported the story, explained,"reviously, survivors benefits that were allocated to the children of a fallen service member were taxed at the parent's rate.
'An absolute betrayal': Gold Star families see death benefit taxed higher under Trump 03:06Indeed, the problem is that surviving military spouses often put a Pentagon-paid survivor benefit in their children's name rather than their own because if they put it in their own, it will cost them money each year on Tax Day.
Gold Star families slammed by Trump's tax overhaul 02:43For years veterans' advocates and those who speak up for military families urged the government to stop this"offset" of benefits. As veterans' advocates, including Rita Barry-Corke at TAPS, note, for the past 18 years, legislation with bipartisan support has been introduced to fix the offset.
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