That are different kinds of taxes. There are taxes especially designed to steer behavior away from discouraged actions or towards encouraged actions and there are taxes that are mainly for funding. That is certainly no absolutely sharp distinction and all taxes can at least at times be used to steer behavior, but income taxes certainly do not exist to discourage having an income.
That's why, instead of trying to figure out what Congress intended, people should just worry about the law as written. Congress can always make changes.
That would work in an ideal world, but in the real world laws will have flaws. That is essentially exactly the same as with vulnerabilities. You find a vulnerability and responsibly disclose it, you are the good guy and maybe get a coffee mug or some money as reward. You exploit the vulnerability until someone else notices it, you are the bad guy and hopefully get punished.
As any other software developer I would certainly love if all the rules in the world were unambiguous and free of flaws, but that is nothing we can have, at least not at the moment. So we all have to deal with it and we all have to accept that the spirit is at times more important than the words.
And just to come back, nobody can seriously claim that they believed it was in the spirit of the law to pay no taxes at all. That is just not how or system works and everybody knows that, don't be surprised if you get punished for trying it anyway.
>That would work in an ideal world, but in the real world laws will have flaws.
Well, sure, and it's incumbent on Congress to fix them, not the bureaucracy or the courts. Of course there is some gray area where you can try to gain extra deductions through miscategorizating expenses and such, but that really a question of the letter of the law and not its spirit.
>And just to come back, nobody can seriously claim that they believed it was in the spirit of the law to pay no taxes at all.
That is entirely irrelevant and not even true for almost half the households in the US.
