Gina Barreca, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, proposes that men be taxed more and women not at all in what must be a tongue-in-cheek (but half-serious) piece in Psychology Today. The sentiment is doubtless quite common, and she gives a litany of reasons women shouldn’t have to pay the government:
After all, women are not the ones wrecking the nation’s whole infrastructure. We’re not the ones shooting at the “No U-turn” signs on rural highways. It’s not women who are trying to make our names as graffiti artists. You’ll rarely find a bunch of broads gathered together attempting to create weapons of mass destruction or figuring out how to really get ahead in next year’s arms race.
We’re not ones running Fortune 500 companies into the ground or manipulating the stock market. As many people have noted, had the firm been called Lehman’s Sisters it might not have gone down the fiscal toilet, taking Wall Street’s profits with it.
[...]
Rebuilding our public schools? If we need to rebuild our public schools, it’s not because of what little girls have done to them. Put it this way: Do we spend $12,846 per school district per annum erasing drawings of male anatomy on desks, walls and bathroom stalls because of little girls? No. Girls just don’t do this. You rarely see little girls drawing pictures of their own reproductive organs while, for example, in the elevator. It simply isn’t how we mark our territory. It would also take too long.
Barreca is a sterling example of a second wave feminist; the type who has a great deal of contempt and hatred for men and boys and a swollen sense of pride and entitlement. She is a professor, after all (of English), and makes her living off of the people’s taxes.
She may be a thoroughly odious human being who uses her publicly funded position to launch attacks on the male sex, but in this instance I’d like to call her bluff and recommend that her proposal to stop taxing women be implemented.
Men may still pay more taxes than women, but as younger men are being purged from the ranks of the middle class, I’m sure the disparity is narrowing, and women probably pay a higher share of taxes today than ever. Were women to be entirely exempt from taxpaying, the government would go bankrupt immediately. Women like Barreca would lose their jobs, police forces would shrink to shadows of what they are today, jails would release hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and courts would be forced to stop prosecuting all but the most serious of crimes. The little money remaining in government coffers would be used to pay off and maintain essential strategic forces and crucial infrastructure, leaving almost nothing for the myriad petty bureaucrats who enforce female supremacy in the United States.
Men, who are already taxed to the hilt, could hardly be expected to make up for shortfalls, and slave labor would be fruitless because slaves themselves cannot pay taxes, and there are cheaper sources of labor abroad anyway.
The thing is, if it weren’t for the enormous public expenditure that is currently directed toward women in our society, they wouldn’t be on top of things — women like Barreca would be bagging groceries instead of terrorizing college boys. Men, in general, could do without, and in many cases we already are. The tax base is already pushed to the limit, men are increasingly broke, and without taxing women the entire facade would come crashing down in no time. If current trends continue, and men are marginalized even farther, women are going to have to pay the majority of taxes to keep their dominant position in society.
Somehow, I don’t think “Dr.” Barreca has thought this through, but at least if her proposal is implemented the current system would fail sooner rather than later, and that would likely be for the better.
