Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of "Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield." Her next book, upcoming for Penguin Press, is set in northeastern Syria. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) The last thing you should have to think about when you have lost a spouse to war is taxation. And yet for Gold Star spouses now facing a tax hike they didn't expect, it's probably hard to think of anything else.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

The tax increase came about inadvertently because of what is called the "Kiddie Tax," a provision that was part of the 2017 tax cuts. As the military publication Task & Purpose , which first reported the story, explained, "(p)reviously, survivors benefits that were allocated to the children of a fallen service member were taxed at the (surviving) parent's rate. Under the new tax code, those benefits are instead treated the same as a trust or estate, which means they can be taxed at a rate as high as 37%, and that threshold is reached faster than it was before. While the change in the tax code may have had an immediate financial impact on Gold Star families this year, it may be a consequence of a more pervasive problem with how survivors benefits are classified and paid out." This provision was intended to catch trust fund children, not Gold Star sons and daughters who need this income to get by.

Task and Purpose cited an example of the widow of a Navy officer killed in a helicopter crash, whose two children have received monthly survivor benefits. "For the past several years she's had to pay roughly $1,150 in taxes on her sons' benefits. This year, it was $5,400," Task and Purpose reported

Addressing the tax on military survivor benefits is urgent, not only to provide financial relief to Gold Star families, but also to re-establish American principles surrounding how we treat those who serve, including their families. Let's hope we use this moment of awareness as an opening to do better by people whom we have asked to give their country their best by thinking through the consequences of policy on these families right from the start.

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Indeed, the problem is that surviving military spouses often put a Pentagon-paid survivor benefit in their children's name rather than their own because if they put it in their own, it will cost them money each year on Tax Day. This is because, according the charity Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), Gold Star spouses receive a tax-free benefit paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs to surviving spouses of service members killed in the line of duty or veterans whose death resulted from a service-related injury or disease.

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