Erin Elizabeth, Founder, Health Nut News
You can tell its election time when any and everything becomes fodder for someones serious attention. And the Erin Eoliticians seemed to have settled on the “tampon tax.”
Most states charge a sales tax on all feminine hygiene products but this is starting to draw criticism from certain political circles, including from the Commander in Chief himself. Obama was recently quoted, during an interview with Ingrid Nilsen, as saying that it’s “sensible” for women to work to remove those taxes. In that same interview President Obama stated that he suspected there were taxes on feminine products because men were making laws when those taxes were passed. He went on to say that the issue, “raises a broader question that I’ve been working on since I came into office which was how do we make sure that everybody has decent healthcare, preventive care, and women in particular have the kind of healthcare that they need.”
Now that so many candidates are attempting to court the female vote, this has become an issue worth discussing. As of June 3rd, Canada was the first country to stop taxing women for tampons. Here are the stats in our country:
- Forty states have some type of sales tax on feminine hygiene products.
- Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon don’t have state sales tax, so tampons are tax-free.
- Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are the only states to exempt tampons and other health products from state sales tax.
While some state lawmakers in California have introduced legislation to exempt feminine hygiene products, the tax remains. And similar bills were introduced in both New York and Ohio, but the tax there remains as well. One of the California lawmakers feels that since women have no other choice but to buy tampons, that these items should be exempt. While I’m not going to disagree that we shouldn’t be taxed to take care of a need that is involuntary- women DO have other, better choices, than tampons.
I’ve written about sea sponges before, check out the story here. They are a much safer and environmentally conscience choice for a woman’s body.
If you’d also like to see the tax disappear, you can join 42,000 others and sign the petition on change.org (it was started by Cosmo Magazine writer and advocate, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf).
