Women's Stake in the Tax System: National Women's Law Center

I've talked a lot in this blog about the way economic and budgetary decisions influence the very social fabric of our democracy.  I argue against making the Bush tax cuts permanent for many different reasons (frankly, I can't think of a single convincing argument that would cut the other way), and here is a good argument against extending the Bush tax cuts from the National Women's Law Center, Tax and Budget Issues are Women's Issues: Sacrificing Women's Priorities to Make Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Few, April 2008.  (Remember, women are still losing in the national economy.  Consider the New York Times story, Women are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy, July 22, 2008.  For the first time since the 60s, a period of some economic recovery saw women's participation in the work force shrinking.  And it wasn't because women decided to opt to be stay-at-homes.  It was because appropriate opportunities were not there.)

The key line from this brief report is in the first paragraph: "[F]ederal tax and budget policy since 2001 has helped the very rich grow even richer, bringing inequality to record levels while sacrificing the needs of low-income women and their families."  Id.

There are some very good graphs illustrating key points, such as the extent to which the benefits of the tax cuts go to the wealthy (the top 1% would get 31% of the benefits, while the bottom 80% would get only  one quarter of the benefit of making the cuts permanent); millionaires would get an average cut of $162,000 in 2012 if the cuts are made permanent, but one quarter of single mother families got nothing from the tax cuts in 2006.  And there's this one:  if the Bush revenue reductions are made permanent, the annual amount that costs us will exceed the combined budgets of Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, State, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.  Meanwhile, food assistance, job training, and other programs that are terribly important to helping those in the middle and lower rungs of the economic ladder make it have been shrunk.

Surely Congress can think of better ways to plan the government's budget than through a giveaway to the wealthy and a takeaway from the vast majority of American taxpayers.

Comments

[CB]

Stop whining.

Women live on average seven years longer than men. If you want true equality, lets let women fight and die in the next 200 wars.

Consider these two hypotheticals:

ONE

If men gave birth and women were denied any say in a man's decision whether or not to abort their offspring, women would be marching on the Supreme Court with battleaxes in their hands.

TWO

If women alone were forced to risk their lives and limbs in combat and men were excluded, women would be marching on Capital Hill with pitchforks in their hands.

[LindaMBeale]

CB

Who is whining? Not me. Stating the facts is not whining. And your hypotheticals don't further your cause.

What you seem to miss is that both women and men are hurt when either gender is forced into a particular role or a particular economic situation because of the biases still pervasive in our society, which create a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Re your second point: Women would rightly complain if they were forced to go into combat while men sat at home (just as women fighting for the right to fight complained about being forced into "combat support" roles rather than being permitted to be full soldiers). In my view, we should have a draft that would draw equally from everyone, like a lottery. I suspect that wars would be much rarer, if the president's daughter was as likely to be drafted as the senator's son, and both as likely as the hardly employed laborer's three children who think that the Army offers a route out of poverty (which of course is what is being used to recruit much of our "volunteer" army).

Re your first point: Abortion is tricky, because there are conflicting demands that have moral and personal components on both sides, so there are feminists who oppose abortion because they value the possibility of nourishing an incipient life above all else, and there are men who fully support abortion because they value the individual liberty of a person to control her own bodily functions more highly than
maintaining the potential viability of a few cells that happen to combine one person's sperm with another's egg. Because it is so difficult to address issues where there are conflicting liberty concerns on both sides, many of us have concluded that abortion should not be banned by the state but should be left to the individual person whose body must bear the burden. I think I would take that same position if the genders were reversed--i.e., I would be with the men who support a woman's right to choose, because if anyone must make that moral choice between two demanding but conflicting positions, it appears that the tiebreaker would be the one whose body bears the burden.