Taxation in the zombie apocalypse

The internet has a habit of repeating itself. When one Youtube channel posts a fun fact, other channels and websites pick up on it and so you hear the same fun fact echoed from time to time. One specific fun fact I can recall quite well now is that “the IRS has a plan for the apocalypse”. I like this fun fact, it provides interesting insights about the US government as a whole and has the potential to inspire some funny rants on social media from the anti-tax bunch. However, I think this fact is somewhat incomplete or misleading. When stated casually, it implies that there is a plan for all possible outcomes (that we can foresee). This is not the case. As professor Adam Chodorow of Arizona State University wrote in 2017, there exists “a glaring gap in academic literature” in regards to how “estate and income tax laws apply to the undead”. Essentially, we do not know how to tax zombies.

In his paper titled “Death and Taxes and Zombies” (I promise you I came up with my title before finding his paper), Chodorow discussed various questions that may arise depending on the type of zombie, such as questions about tax laws for married couples where one of the spouses is a zombie, or if a zombie’s property is to be passed on to their next of kin. The answers to these questions often, if not always, depend on if the zombie is alive.

Black’s Law Dictionary (2nd edition) defines life as “That state of animals and plants, or of an organized being, in which its natural functions and motions are performed, or in which its organs are capable of performing their functions.” By this definition, zombies are alive, but does this mean we should consider them human? In my opinion, it depends. Are they simply a human whose brain is so ravaged by a specific disease that they act like a zombie indefinitely? Or are they a human whose brain is dead, with a body controlled by a specific disease? In the case of the former, I believe that the zombie is still a human and so is to be considered as such in tax laws, with no mention of a death, much akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease who may be beyond recognition, but still the legal owner of many things. In the case of the latter, I believe that the zombie is not human, and so one may consider the original owner of the body dead.

But even if the zombie isn’t human, does that mean it’s entirely exempt from taxation? If it showed up to work, does it deserve remuneration? Should this remuneration be taxed? These are questions that have never been properly studied, and I don’t plan on giving an educated/well-thought answer to them, so to conclude this “weekly” I will give an uneducated/untested one:

Nevermind, I lied, I will not give an answer. My planned answer was to “make the zombie take the Turing Test” to see if it was conscious, however, I horrifically discovered while doing some research that Chat-GPT has actually passed a version of the Turing Test. Since I will never admit that artificial intelligence is sentient, I must disregard the Turing Test as a sufficient test for consciousness. This means I know no way of proving if the zombie is conscious. Therefore, you will have no answer from me, but you can rest assured knowing that my next newsletter, whenever it may come, will probably be about the Turing Test.

Fun Fact: The US government have published *a* plan called CONPLAN 8888 designed to formalise a response from the US government in the case of a zombie apocalypse. The plan was made by officers in training as an assignment and can be read in full here.

A quote for the week:

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams