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Liberals for Tax Cuts!

By Jim Swift

It’s been news in recent days at left-leaning organs like The Nation that in the waning days of the Obama administration, there are still dark, cobwebbed sections of public law that need to be cleansed of their misogyny.

Move over allegations of wage discrimination, there’s a new issue du jour: tax discrimination. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s because some people believe women are being discriminated against by local sales taxes on… tampons.

President Obama has been mocked for avoiding serious questions from actual journalists and giving exclusives to YouTube celebrities. These days, politicians need to give the people what the want, and YouTube personalities are quite popular, so it’s hard to blame the White House for giving an exclusive to 26-year-old YouTuber Missglamorazzi (3.8 million subscribers).

Ingrid Nilsen, as she is known to her actual friends, told President Obama that she, recently, “was shocked to learn that pads, tampons, and other menstrual products are taxed as ‘luxury goods’ in over 40 states.” Obama laughed, awkwardly, and Nielson continued “I don’t know anyone who has a period who thinks it’s a luxury.”



Ordinarily, we could stop the tape right here and chalk this up to an uniformed youngster who does not understand that sales taxes are mostly levied by state, county, and municipal governments. Just like the 476,000 people who signed a petition asking President Obama to pardon Steven Avery, the focus of Netflix’s hit Making A Murderer, this is something outside his purview. It’s not a federal matter. (Civics are important, kids!)

Surprisingly (or not), President Obama was unaware of the fact the sales taxes apply to most non-prescription items purchased at the local drugstore:

The basic idea is that women should not be at a disadvantage in the health care system and this is just one more example of it, which I confess I was not aware of until you brought it to my attention.

He added: “I suspect it’s because men were making the laws when those taxes were passed.” Swoon. (Unintentionally ironic headline: President Obama Doesn’t Understand the ‘Tampon Tax’ Either)

California is already on the case. Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens)’s office writes, in a press release:

Today, on a 4-0 [sic], the California State Board of Equalization endorsed Assembly Bill 1561, a measure to make menstrual products, exempt from sales tax. The bill, joint authored by Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) and Assemblymember Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond) seeks to end the “tampon tax” and bring more gender equity to California’s tax code. “Effectively we are being taxed for being born as women,” Garcia stated. “AB 1561 is about social justice, gender equity in our tax code, it’s an opportunity to end an outdated tax that uniquely targets women for a function of their body, a function we don’t control and can’t ignore every month of our adult life.”

Nilsen’s framing of a sales tax that includes tampons and other feminine hygiene goods as “luxury” is an interesting spin. To most people, they’re known as “sales taxes.” Outside of the board game Monopoly, the term “luxury Tax” is most recently associated with one-term President George H.W. Bush, who signed “luxury tax” bill that imposed higher taxes on the “sale of jewelry, furs, passenger vehicles, watercraft, and aircraft.” (Since repealed.)

It’s nice to see liberals fight for lower taxes and argue against regressive taxation. But the framing of this as a “tampon tax” just isn’t accurate.

The Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell, formerly an economics reporter, observes:

First of all, it’s highly misleading to call the taxes that tampons are subject to “tampon taxes.” To my knowledge, no jurisdiction has a tampon-specific tax, as it might an alcohol or yacht tax. Politicians didn’t one day decide that periods were gross and therefore ought to be made more expensive. Instead, when states and cities needed revenue, they passed general sales taxes — which happened to fall upon tampons along with countless other goods. Then, every interest group on earth came out of the woodwork demanding a carve-out on the grounds that their product or service was a “necessity,” just as anti-“tampon tax” activists have recently done. But what is a “necessity,” exactly? It’s a pretty squishy term. Almost any product can be called necessary in modern times. And almost every product has.

Rampell takes the earnest appeals of California legislators and turns them on their head by pointing out what they already exempt as “necessities:”

In California, the state where a “tampon tax” repeal bill has gotten the most press, such tax-favored purchases include: candy and bottled water, school yearbooks, certain commemorative lapel pins, hot prepared foods sold to airlines, farm equipment, garment alterations and racehorse breeding stock.

The problem, of course, is that in the mind of politicians, these exemptions need to be made up by higher taxes elsewhere.

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