Remember when the progressive media was up in arms about Warren Buffets secretary paid more or had a higher tax rate (can’t remember) than Buffet?

Everyone wanted to raise Buffet’s taxes. No one mentioned lowering his secretary’s taxes.

https://mises.org/wire/abolish-tampon-tax-even-if-its-what-sjws-want?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=3044042b58-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-3044042b58-228343965

Ryan McMaken

The latest evidence of the brutality of the patriarchy, we are told, is the fact that sanitary napkins are subject to sales tax. Thus, some protests have sprung up around the country decrying the fact tampons and pads are made less affordable by taxation.

Some the SJW-world’s natural enemies were quick to point to the hypocrisy of a group that tends to never meet a tax increase it doesn’t like. Laissez-faire musician Eric July, for example, quips , “Oh so nooooow it’s theft?” He means taxation.

Oh so nooooow it’s theft? https://t.co/1tQu4ruXnd

— Eric July (@EricDJuly) October 21, 2019

The reasoning used by the protestors was summarized by Congresswomen Sylvia Garcia who complained “I’m convinced that if men menstruated, there would be a tampon machine in every bathroom everywhere.”

Moreover, as public radio station WBUR contends , people who menstruate (i.e., women and girls) “spend an estimated $150 million a year just on the sales tax for these items.”

Thus, the alleged fact the “tampon tax” targets only these groups — and the fact men don’t menstruate — shows we must end the tax on these items immediately.

In Fact, Lots of Men Pay This Tax

One doesn’t need to endorse the line of reasoning used by Garcia and the WBUR authors to be fine with a tax cut on these items.

After all, as a man with a wife and two daughters (among other children), I can assure my readers that “people who menstruate” are not the only people who pay taxes on feminine hygiene products.

Taxes on these items dent the household budget of every person in every household that purchases these items. That includes a lot of men. These taxes also reduce overall consumption for every shop, store, and merchant who provides these sorts of products. Which means entrepreneurs — both male and female — are also hit by the tax. Like all taxes, the “tampon tax” drains wealth from both buyers and sellers, and sends it to government bureaucrats.

Yes, the general framing of the issue by the protesters is silly. The idea that old men in charge of the machinery of government only tax tampons because they are are indifferent to the cost imposed is implausible. After all, there is no known case of a sales tax being levied specifically on sanitary napkins. They’re simply taxed at the usual sales-tax rate imposed on many, many items. Moreover, when men (mostly in local governments) were first imposing these sales taxes, the taxes were more likely to directly affect men than they are now. In the past, men were more likely to share a household with a women than is the case today. Thus, modern men, freed from the shackles of a shared household budget with women, should be clamoring for higher tampon taxes now.  No evidence suggests this is true.

Of course, the protestors have a wide variety of reasons as to why men might tax themselves more, just to spite women. As noted by Catherine Rampell , the idea here seems to be that men “one day decide[d] that periods were gross and therefore ought to be made more expensive.”

This might make sense if seventh-grade boys were setting sales-tax rates, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. After all, as the left is so fond of telling us, right wingers all worship the idea of homo economicus and are unable to refuse the prospect of monetary and material gain. Clearly, these people wouldn’t tax themselves more for such an inane reason.

Raising Taxes to Own the Libs

The tribalism encouraged by the culture war has driven some opponents of the protesters to embrace higher taxes, apparently out of spite. Writing for The Federalist, Elizabeth Bauer opposes lower taxes, so long as the tax cut happens to be for tampons and pads. Such a tax cut, she contends, is “a crazy sort of scorekeeping” and is “more about scoring points for one’s tribe” than what we really need which is “a tax code that is sensible and reasonable for everyone.”

The idea here seems to be: “higher taxes are good, so long as it means sticking it to those leftists!”

I hate to break it to Bauer, but the tax code is already rife with “a crazy sort of scorekeeping.”…

If there is perceived unfairness in the tax code, the solution is to lower taxes on the groups currently paying higher rates, until rates are equalized. Opposing tax cuts for reasons of “fairness” or sticking it to leftists just ends up ensuring tax rates never actually go down. Besides, demanding that menstruating women pay more taxes does not make for a great political cause.

Be seeing you