Bridget Crawford (Pace; Google Scholar) presents Pink Tax and Other Tropes, 34 Yale J.L. & Feminism __ (2022) at NYU today as part of its Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium hosted by Daniel Shaviro:
Law reform advocates should be strategic in deploying tax tropes. This Article examines five common tax phrases—the “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax”—and demonstrates that tax rhetoric is more likely to influence law when used to describe specific economic injustices resulting from actual government duties, as opposed to figurative "taxes" in the form of other real-life burdens or differences. Slogans referring to figurative taxes are less likely to influence law and human behavior, despite their descriptive force in both popular and academic literature as a short-hand for group-based disparities. This Article catalogues and evaluates what makes for effective tax talk, in terms of impact on the law generally as well as dayto-day actions on the ground. With this roadmap, lawyers, policy makers and others will be able make more forceful and precise arguments aimed at reforming the law and changing human behavior.
This Article makes three principal claims—one descriptive, one empirical, and one normative.
The Article first develops a taxonomy of tax phrases based on the object of critique. The classification distinguishes between criticisms of compulsory formal levies, on the one hand, and burdens or oppressions that are akin to taxes, on the other. The taxonomy also accounts for differences among tax tropes based on their linguistic form. Some phrases deploy a single-word modifier for “tax” (“nanny,” “death,” or “soda”) to signify a larger relationship, event, or transaction that is subject to taxation. Other phrases use a single-word modifier for “tax” (“Black” or “pink”) that is strongly associated with the persons subject to taxation.
The Article next engages in a content analysis of multiple data sets of printed popular and scholarly literature to compare the relative “success” of the phrases “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax,” as measured by frequency of use, links to legal reform, and impacts on taxpayer behavior. The resulting preliminary hypothesis is that tax tropes that deploy suggestive modifiers to describe literal taxes are more effective than those that allude to identity axes associated with figurative taxes.
Finally turning its focus to the highly variable “pink tax” trope, in particular, the Article then makes normative recommendations for rethinking use of that complex phrase. The “pink tax” is an overarching description of related manifestations of gender inequality: the gender wage gap, gender-based pricing differences in consumer goods or services, disproportionate expenses incurred by a large portion of the population for safe travel or to maintain stereotypically “feminine” appearances, and unequal time burdens experienced by those responsible for households or caregiving. But only one manifestation of the “pink tax,” as a description for the state sales tax on menstrual products, has been well served by a tax shorthand phrase. “Tampon tax” talk has fueled litigation and advocacy efforts; it has led to law reform in at least eleven jurisdictions, with more states expected to follow. Indeed, “pink tax” rhetoric describing figurative taxes might not, on its own, lead directly to legal change. For that reason, at least when arguing for law reform, gender equality advocates should not over-rely on “pink tax” talk or figurative tax tropes.
