98
Scalia, J., dissenting
to the "capital" nature of compensatory damages. But the Treasury Decision was no more explicitly limited to compensatory damages than is the statute before us. It exempted from taxation "an amount received by an individual as the result of a suit or compromise for personal injuries." T. D. 2747, supra, at 457. The Court's entire thesis of taxability rests upon the proposition that this Treasury Decision, which overlooked the obvious fact that "an amount received . . . as the result of a suit or compromise for personal injuries" almost always includes compensation for lost future income, did not overlook the obvious fact that such an amount sometimes includes "smart money."
So, to trace the Court's reasoning: The statute must exclude punitive damages because the Committee Report must have had in mind a 1918 Treasury Decision, whose text no more supports exclusion of punitive damages than does the text of the statute itself, but which must have meant to exclude punitive damages since it was based on the "return-of-capital" theory, though, inconsistently with that theory, it did not exclude the much more common category of compensation for lost income. Congress supposedly knew all of this, and a reasonably diligent lawyer could figure it out by mistrusting the inclusive language of the statute, consulting the Committee Report, surmising that the Treasury Decision of 1918 underlay that Report, mistrusting the inclusive language of the Treasury Decision, and discerning that Treasury could have overlooked lost-income compensatories, but could not have overlooked punitives. I think not. The sure and proper guide, it seems to me, is the language of the statute, inclusive by nature and doubly inclusive by contrast with surrounding provisions.
The Court poses the question, ante, at 86, "why Congress might have wanted the exclusion [in § 104(a)(2)] to have covered . . . punitive damages." If an answer is needed (and the text being as clear as it is, I think it is not), surely it suffices to surmise that Congress was following the Treasury
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