Tan Tax a ‘War on Women’: Op-Ed
The federal excise tax on indoor tanning has needlessly devastated the predominantly female-owned tanning industry, tax policy expert Ryan Ellis wrote in an op-ed article for the The Washington Times last week, calling it Obamacare’s own “war on women.”
“In the past four years, an estimated 8,000 tanning salons have closed their doors, according to the American Suntanning Association. This has cost 64,000 employees and owners of these tanning salons their jobs,” Ellis wrote. “Seventy percent of all tanning salons are owned by women — an astonishingly high number, considering that women own less than 30 percent of all firms in America. This is clearly an industry where women feel their unique talents fit in very well. This tax on female-owned tanning salons (written by overwhelmingly male tax staffers and voted into law by an overwhelmingly male Congress) is coming at a tremendous price to their slice of the American dream.”
The tax not only disproportionately affects women, but is “a nuisance rather than a source of government revenue,” according to Ellis. Of the more than $1 trillion in tax dollars that Obamacare is projected to generate in the next decade, the tan tax was expected to bring in just $2.7 billion, only a fraction of which will actually be collected at the current pace. And as revenue has failed to meet expectations, thousands of businesses have closed and tens of thousands of jobs have been lost.
“Obamacare must be repealed, in whole or in part,” Ellis wrote. “A very good place to start — and to help rebuild a devastated startup sector — is to repeal the just plain dumb Obamacare tanning tax.”
