US tax rate on women's underwear is higher than on men's

Okay, sure; in the interest of staying on the actual topic at hand:


Systemic disparity problems don’t get solved by just ignoring them.

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Not necessarily. Remember this?

ETA: and, @Melizmatic , exactly! And in the US we still pay the taxes on our period products, so we’re over-taxed for our 40 years of “potential brooding mare” status as well. :roll_eyes:

Thinking about it, seems even more unfair that our underwear has higher tariffs. It’s a fucking war zone down there. :joy:

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The problem I have with the category change suggestion isn’t that it is a derail (I can’t tell) but rather that it just isn’t likely to work. Unlike a specialty cooking ingredient used by a few people each year women’s underwear likely make up much more than half of underwear sales. To have any measurable effect the majority of underwear would have the be recategorized as men’s. And women buying “men’s” underwear would have to be acceptable to most of mainstream America from Walmart to agent provocateur…

In… This… Universe.

Reducing the tariff would literally be a simpler and more likely scenario. Not likely either but at least there is only one organizational body.

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It’s easy to forget that the corollary to “assume good faith” is “ignore ambiguous faith and move along.”

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Kinda hard to do that when someone actively announces otherwise, but okay…

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The schedules of tariffs are subdivided by sex.

So, for instance,

6107/6207 is mens, 6108/6208 is womens.

bras get their own category, as does hosiery.

http://tariffdata.wto.org/TariffList.aspx

(That’s from the wto, so the categories themselves can’t be abolished by a stroke of a US pen)

The ostensible purpose of tariffs is that they’re supposed to protect domestic manufacturing. A well connected ladies underwear plant might argue that they need those tariffs to support American jobs, but if there are no well connected mens underwear plants, the standard rate gets approved. If there’s a manufacturer of men’s boots that wants protection, higher tariffs get applied to men’s boots… Overtime, this mosaic of special carveouts ends up costing certain customers more, but deep down it’s a maze of weird exceptions.

One “solution” is to get rid of clothing tariffs entirely, but the same mills that have argued for weird carveouts that end up having a sexist impact will then decamp for Vietnam.

The fact that tariffs are meant to protect domestic production does not explain why men’s and women’s items get a different tariff. That is a pointless tax on women.

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It does have a point, though, It protects jobs in a particular factory. Don’t mistake individual trees for a “forest.”

Dude please never gaslight women about the realities we face with a flippant statement like that ever again. Geez!

It sure as hell ain’t for our benefit. And whatever the end goal it is still forcing women to subsidize the industry more than men. Your point absolutely does not refute hers.

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Eh no… it’s historical (and frankly dumb these days but :person_shrugging: ):

Most women I talk with who sew are of the “lady’s maid” school of thought.

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Zippers too.

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I think we aren’t talking about the same thing, here. The objection @Melizmatic raised, which I seconded, wasn’t about the intellectual exercise of flipping the script on the tariffs (which was already a thing and doesn’t work, as I pointed out), but rather “missing the point” intentionally, as a rhetorical maneuver to undermine the point of the original post. @kanadanmajava admitted that they were using that maneuver. When you post something you don’t mean, it’s either sarcasm/farce or…

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That’s my point. It’s for the benefit of individual manufacturing plants located within the United States or various colonial appendages, each of which tends to argue for special carveouts. Columbia Sportswear and similar concerns argue that they shouldn’t pay more for boots for a specific gender when they import them from China. But the owner of a boot processing plant in the Mariana islands may have a different view. It’s the latter interest that is served by the rate setter.

I concur.

Exactly.

This is a real issue that negatively impacts women in the US on a massive scale, so nonsensical “solutions” posted for ‘the lulz’ or for attention don’t advance the conversation; they marginalize and trivialize it.

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There is no reason for them to be assessed at different rates, other than to make it more expensive for us to exist. NONE. To say other wise is gaslighting bullshit, as @TornPaperNapkin noted. Protecting domestic production doesn’t explain the difference. Misogyny does. I’m sick of people telling us that we don’t face what we face.

episode 8 bullshit GIF by RuPaul's Drag Race

One more time, since you keep ignoring us, IT DOES NOT EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN’S CLOTHING GETTING A DIFFERENT TARIFF.

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Here’s a Supreme Court Docket for Totes Isotoner Corp v United States. Here’s the appellate decision/.

TOTES ISOTONER CORPORATION v. UNITED STATES (2010)

since the supreme court rejected cert. the reasoning of Federal Circuit still stands.

The court decided

. We also affirm its judgment that Totes has failed to state an equal protection claim due to its failure to plead facts sufficient to allege a claim of unconstitutional discrimination.

… The reasons behind different duty rates vary widely based on country of origin, the type of product, the circumstances under which the product is imported, and the state of the domestic manufacturing industry. Under such circumstances it is quite possible, even likely, that the different tariff rates for men’s and other gloves reflect the fact that such gloves are in fact different products, manufactured by different entities in different countries with differing impacts on domestic industry. Further, differential rates may be the result of trade concessions made by the United States in return for unrelated trade advantages.8 Absent a showing that Congress intended to discriminate against men in the tariff schedule, we cannot simply assume the existence of such an unusual purpose from the mere fact of disparate impact.

So, that’s the bullshit they’re slinging. I doubt the Supreme Court is willing to take up a similar case, unless driven by a vendetta (plausible, but, it’s unlikely to be for the consumer’s benefit).

Oh, well, the SCOTUS said misogyny is okay… /s :roll_eyes:

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