Gender taxes?
An Italian economist on the BBC proposed a new form of selective taxation, gender taxes. According to his scheme women will be taxed less! In that way he hopes that this will attract women to work more, and since they will gain more income after taxes, this will to some extent balance out the lower salaries women are paid often for the same work.
This scheme is based on the fact that women in the western world tend to take less challenging and less risky jobs. For example, there are in proportion more females in teaching, nursing, service jobs than in business and finance. Also, even within these more male-dominated areas, women tend to take the less risky jobs, so that there are very few women in corporate high finance. The reasons are obvious, women tend to be less aggressive, and need to have more job security so that they can attend to their children and family. One could therefore argue that women get the percentage of men's salaries on average that they deserve (as determined by the market). But, to engage in a bit of social engineering is not bad. In order to recompensate women for the difficult roles they have to juggle, and to face the fact that men and women are in fact biologically different, it makes sense to tax the two genders differentially.
In order to compensate the Government for its loss of revenue due to lower taxes for women, this would be accompanied with a concurrent increase in taxes for men. If men earn more than women they should expect to pay more taxes than women. This form of gender discrimination, while it goes against all the politically correct attitudes that we have come to accept in the West, would end up making a fairer distribution of wealth in society.
This scheme is obviously more appropriate to Italy, where women tend to work much less outside the home, than to Scandinavia, where women are treated more or less equally to men in all spheres of the workplace. But, the concept of gender-based taxes could be very helpful in the developing world where the culture is strongly stacked against women working at all.
This scheme is based on the fact that women in the western world tend to take less challenging and less risky jobs. For example, there are in proportion more females in teaching, nursing, service jobs than in business and finance. Also, even within these more male-dominated areas, women tend to take the less risky jobs, so that there are very few women in corporate high finance. The reasons are obvious, women tend to be less aggressive, and need to have more job security so that they can attend to their children and family. One could therefore argue that women get the percentage of men's salaries on average that they deserve (as determined by the market). But, to engage in a bit of social engineering is not bad. In order to recompensate women for the difficult roles they have to juggle, and to face the fact that men and women are in fact biologically different, it makes sense to tax the two genders differentially.
In order to compensate the Government for its loss of revenue due to lower taxes for women, this would be accompanied with a concurrent increase in taxes for men. If men earn more than women they should expect to pay more taxes than women. This form of gender discrimination, while it goes against all the politically correct attitudes that we have come to accept in the West, would end up making a fairer distribution of wealth in society.
This scheme is obviously more appropriate to Italy, where women tend to work much less outside the home, than to Scandinavia, where women are treated more or less equally to men in all spheres of the workplace. But, the concept of gender-based taxes could be very helpful in the developing world where the culture is strongly stacked against women working at all.
posted by Jack Cohen at 1:53 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting subject. As it is difficult to evaluate the reality value of such ideas, someone should try to make a kind of test run on a computer, if this is possible. Is it possible?
Georg
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