Male tax one step closer to reality (EU and US related)!!!

Rebadow · #1 21st-April-2007

Quote:

Why women should pay less tax

Published: April 18 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 18 2007 03:00

Normally, free-marketeers and those who are worried about the efficiency costs of taxation are in opposite camps from those social activists who believe you need extensive government intervention to achieve a range of social goals. Here is a policy proposal that should make the two camps agree: reduce income taxes on women and increase, by less, income taxes on men.

As surprising as it may look, this can be done while keeping total tax revenue constant and reducing average tax rates. Thus, this policy would at the same time reduce overall tax distortions and increase women's participation in the labour force. It would achieve similar goals to affirmative action policies, quotas or subsidised childcare and could substitute for those policies. It would also make gender discrimination more costly for employers and would be fair because it would compensate women for bearing the brunt of maternity and for the fact that the possibility of having children can negatively affect their career prospects.

How is it possible to achieve the miracle of raising taxes on men by less than the reduction on women while also holding tax revenue constant? The answer is well known to any graduate student in public finance. The supply of labour of women is more responsive to their after-tax wage, so a reduction in taxes increases the labour participation of women substantially. Men's labour supply is more rigid, so an increase in taxes does not reduce their labour supply by much, if at all. Ergo, for a given tax cut on women, with a smaller tax increase on men, one maintains the same total revenue with fewer tax distortions. This is simply an application of the general principle of public finance that goods with a more elastic supply should be taxed less. Our computations, available in our working paper, Gender Based Taxation*, suggest that the difference in tax rates across gender that would be implied by our proposal - based upon different labour responses to wages - could be quite large, especially in countries where the labour participation of women is not as high, such as the -Nordic countries.

Since we are talking about people and not goods, one needs to worry about whether such a policy undermines other social goals. In fact it does not, and this is why social activists should favour it as well. Increasing the labour participation of women is an explicit goal of the European Union's Lisbon agenda. It sets a very ambitious target for female employment, especially in southern Europe, where women tend to stay at home more. Reducing the cost of working for women (ie their taxes) is the simplest and most direct way of achieving that goal. Concern over the discrimination against women in the labour force underlies many policies of "quotas" for women or affirmative action. A lower tax on women would lower their pre-tax wage and increase their after-tax wage, making it relatively cheaper for an employer to hire women. Discrimination would then become more costly. As for pollution, it is easier and more effective to tax the undesirable activity (ie make it costly) rather than prevent it by regulation or other forms of government activism.

Often those who care about women's work emphasise the policy of supporting it with publicly funded childcare facilities. A higher take-home salary for women created by our proposal would allow them to buy more childcare at market prices and, since childcare facilities employ mostly women, they would also benefit on their costs. Moreover childcare subsidies target only women who have children; the problems of gender discrimination and low female labour force participation are more general. Not all countries will want to subsidise fertility directly.

In the long run, gender-based taxation may contribute to changing the traditional division of labour within the family, which currently encourages men to work more in the market and women more often at home. If and when a change happens (and many social activists consider that a desirable goal), the response of male and female labour supply (their "elasticities", in technical terms) may become less different from each other then they are today. At that point, one may need to reconsider the differences in tax rates, precisely as the basic principles of optimal taxation suggest.
In conclusion: would it be unfair for the fiscal authority to treat women and men differently? We do not believe so. There is nothing more hypocritical than to invoke equal treatment in some areas (taxation) for those who are not treated equally in many other areas (the labour market; sometimes in the family allocation of tasks, such as rearing children or caring for elder family members). We already have a host of policies that are not gender neutral. We could eliminate many of them by adopting a simple differentiation of tax schedules for men and women. And do not forget that a large part of the redistribution of the tax burden implied by this proposal would occur within the same family: the husbands of married women who choose to work would also benefit from their wife earning a higher take-home salary.

The writers are economics professors respectively at Harvard University and the University of Bologna

Source is here.

They are actually serious about this. And remember, this is not just deluded rabid feminists. This is Harvard and Bologna. Oh right, looks like there is no difference anymore.

Sir Loin · #2 21st-April-2007

Oh no they di'int! *triple snap*

I'm assuming this would have to work its way through the legislative process, and I just don't see it passing the US Congress, even with pinkos like Pelosi running the show... Can't speak for Parliament.

In a way, though, it may be beneficial for the MRA movement if they do try to push this bullshit through. Guys who normally sit around and take shit from womyn as if it's the natural order may get a bit more motivated when they start feeling an unfair sting in the pocketbook.

Want to motivate a sleeping giant? Mess with its money... Hell, if the Brits hadn't been dicks about taxing the colonies, we'd probably still be loyal subjects of the Empire over here.

**the sad geek** · #3 21st-April-2007

A future where everybody is forced to be equal. Why does this remind me of the Gleichschaltung?

When will people learn that you shouldn't put ideology before humanity?

Feminist_Scum · #4 21st-April-2007

Male tax for domestic abuse on women? Haha.

OK, wimmin tax for wimmin who cry rape then.

Feminist_Scum · #5 21st-April-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by the sad geek

A future where everybody is forced to be equal. Why does this remind me of the Gleichschaltung?

When will people learn that you shouldn't put ideology before humanity?

They wouldn't be forced to be equal, femcunts want women to have more rights than men, as if they don't have too many rights already.

TheSharpenedPen · #6 21st-April-2007

This article is written by a financial journal which apparently sees nothing wrong with men being taxed at a higher rate than women. No wait a minute, we already are! Men pay more for car insurance even though insurance companies are still using stats 40 or more years old when there were hardly any women drivers on the road!

The idea of a tax, even if some brain dead elitists at a magazine say so, which targets one gender for higher rates over the other is morally reprehenisble. I refuse to pay. I refuse to pay no matter how many police you send my way, no matter how many armed forces, no matter if you seize my assets and throw me onto the street - I will never pay more for my income tax because I am a male. I will become a terrorist first and many more men will join me.

We've already been denied education, jobs, promotions, our children - you try to take one more thing from men and that snapping sound you heard earlier could well be your spineless necks.

Sir Loin · #7 22nd-April-2007

"Men pay more for car insurance even though insurance companies are still using stats 40 or more years old when there were hardly any women drivers on the road!"

I'd known about this disparity in insurance rates for a while, but I've never even thought to explore its basis. Just sort of took the "authoritative facts" for granted, I suppose.

If you could offer any references on the statistical studies on which insurance companies base their rates, I'd personally be very interested. This is the sort of territory in which we could have some effect... exposing blatant hypocrisy.

If present-day auto insurance rates are truly based on 40-year old studies, this is definitely something worthy of widespread public exposure. Has cellphone usage even been factored into the equation? Shit... they've been commonplace for at least 12 years or so now. Seems like women would be pretty prone to collision whilst yapping away on the cellular teli.

Yan Yan · #8 22nd-April-2007

Quote:

The idea of a tax, even if some brain dead elitists at a magazine say so, which targets one gender for higher rates over the other is morally reprehenisble. I refuse to pay. I refuse to pay no matter how many police you send my way, no matter how many armed forces, no matter if you seize my assets and throw me onto the street - I will never pay more for my income tax because I am a male. I will become a terrorist first and many more men will join me.

We've already been denied education, jobs, promotions, our children - you try to take one more thing from men and that snapping sound you heard earlier could well be your spineless necks.

Somebody, over on MND I think, coined a beautiful phrase - "The Popeye Moment". For those of you who remember, Popeye the Sailorman would spend 9 minutes of a 10-minute cartoon trying to be Mr. Niceguy, but eventually he would say, " I've had all I can stands an I can't stands no more" - then he'd reach for the spinach and all hell would be let loose.

Keep that spinach handy!

Tyrael · #9 22nd-April-2007

I've moved this thread to the Raw deals: A men only club forum.

This would be a clear form of unequal treatment of men, if women pay less tax then men, because the taxation would be in favor of women. It's against principles of men and women being treated as equals. These kinds of absurd policies need to be stopped.

Rebadow · #10 22nd-April-2007

If anyone's interested, here is complete original study (pdf file).

TheSharpenedPen · #11 22nd-April-2007

Looks to me like this is some form of women's math.

Did the dunderheads ever think to factor in the impact of increased crime as men are routinely denied opportunities and treated as less than human? Surely this will hurt the economy in a variety of ways. Publicly funded daycare is already leading to maladjusted children who go on to commit crimes later in life, to say nothing of the tremendous cost of these government run programs. In short, I think they need to take a pen stroke through their equation and in its place write the following:

(ME x ME x ME) + a hell of a lot more ME.