Taxing Women
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Taxing Women comprises both an insightful, critical analysis of the gender biases in current tax laws and a wake-up call for all those concerned with gender justice to pay more attention to the pervasive impact of such laws. Providing real-life examples, Edward McCaffery shows how tax laws are actually written to punish married couples who file jointly. No dual-income household can afford not to read this book before filing their taxes.
“Taxing Women is a must-have primer for any woman who wants to understand how our current tax system affects her family’s economic condition. In plain English, McCaffery explains how the tax code stacks the deck against women and why it’s in women’s economic interest to lead the next great tax rebellion.”—Patricia Schroeder
“McCaffery is an expert on the interplay between taxes and social policy. . . . Devastating in his analysis. . . . Intriguing.”—Harris Collingwood, Working Women
“A wake-up call regarding the inequalities of an archaic system that actually penalizes women for working.”—Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Any contemporary woman who believes that strides toward gender equality are reflected in the tax laws of the U.S. should read this book, a wake-up call regarding the inequities of an archaic system that actually penalizes women for working. Author McCaffery, a USC and Cal Tech law professor, offers an array of numbers, charts and historical anecdotes to demonstrate how women are kept on the margins of economic life--particularly by the joint filing system that deems working wives "secondary earners" in a tax bracket dictated by their husbands' salaries. "The average working wife in a middle- or upper-income household sees two-thirds of her salary lost to taxes and work-related expenses," he writes, offering examples of women who found they could not afford to work once they factored in child-care costs. But he makes clear that staying at home is also a no-win situation--one that can be ruinous to divorced women entering old age with little work experience, no pensions and "no social security benefits saved up from their years of marriage." McCaffery's stinging critique of the way things are could have benefited from real-life stories instead of his cartoonish constructs "Emma Equal" and "Sally Single." Still, his book makes a persuasive case that "taxing men more and women less" is a step in the right direction.
