Death is not free. Funeral, burial, or cremation costs are the thirdlargest
category of expense over the lifetime of the average American, while
poverty paradoxically remains the fourth leading cause of death. Many are
unable to shoulder the often-exorbitant cost of death care without being forced
to beg, borrow, or simply abandon human remains. Sufficient resources exist
to ensure that everyone is laid to rest with dignity in the United States, but
those resources are not evenly distributed. This is a conversation about
affordable and humane disposition of remains as a right rather than a
privilege. It is a discussion made more difficult because several underlying
issues are colliding in one space: consumer behavior is aberrational because
of a desire to render death invisible; the funeral industry has an outsized voice
in its own regulation; there are no reliable and broadly accessible death care
prepayment instruments; and, expanding the (arguably inadequate) social
safety net in the United States is usually an idea met with resistance.
This Article proposes a way of leveraging the Internal Revenue Code
to deliver death benefits to low- and middle-income taxpayers through the
section 529 savings infrastructure. Section 529 plans are the fastest growing
investment product in the United States, with every state administering a
structure that provides parents with a tax-advantaged way to save for college.
These existing pathways may be used to tax shelter deathcare savings. The
529 End-of-Life Plan is politically strategic in its subtlety; the same
scaffolding that provides substantial tax incentives may be dual-purposed to
deliver targeted safety-net death benefits to our most vulnerable.
