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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Of course it does. The tax code is a law written by humans, which means it’s a set of emotional value judgements written in dry enough language that we can pretend what you said is true.

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The tax code itself does not deal with emotions. There's no code with a provision that says you can ignore it if you feel sad about something.

The people applying the tax code can make exceptions at their discretion. It's a difference.

It's not, though. The code was written with a certain emotional state. If Senator Jones of the Great State of Wherever's kids were kidnapped, we'd have the Jones amendment to the tax code saying that kids were dependents until they clearly weren't, because we were all sad for Senator Jones at the time we wrote the code. Ignoring that fact means that we treat the law as some piece of inviolable logic, as opposed to something we thought made sense at the time, and prevents us from seeing it as something we both can and ought to change should it not deliver the results we want.

If ever you wanted to see a prime example of emotionally derived laws, look at how fast the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11. That body of legislation was sitting in a desk, waiting for the day where it could exploit our emotions about the situation. And their plan worked perfectly.

There's also a distinction between rules that were created by the legislature, possibly motivated by emotion as you describe, and rules resulting from interpretations by courts. While the former has no limits on their reasoning process, the latter is supposed to stick to the intentions of the law, which would preclude emotional decisions.

Presumably the rule is there to subsidize child-rearing. When the child is gone (kidnapping, death, ascention to heaven, etc), the law would logically not apply any more, so there will be details about where the cuttoff falls. If people wanted want to give cash to unfortunate parents, judges interpreting the laws should tell you to pass another law for it.

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