"Only women should negotiate state budget"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Having covered North Carolina legislatures since the 1970s, I have come to the conclusion that budget negotiations could be resolved much more quickly with one simple solution.

No one should be allowed to participate in the budget negotiations unless they are wearing makeup and heels. That is, men should be barred from budget negotiations and replaced by women.

I come to this conclusion after following the House-Senate budget negotiations last week in which the Senate walked out and in which there were threats made to stay until Christmas.
...
An agreement would be reached in no time, and the legislature would go home. But that would deprive the guys of days and maybe weeks of more posturing, jaw flapping and chest bumping.'

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Comments

... to babble their foolishness in newspapers, either.

But to address his ludicrous assertion, if you hand $10,000 to 20 women, all of whom have concerns about how and in whose general interest it is spent, and they're each from different neighborhoods in the same city and each have relatives who could benefit from how it's spent (paralleling constituents, including campaign contributors and individual voters), does anyone think that without a set time their determination must end (or else forfeit the money) that they'll always readily decide how to spend it? Or might they not haggle endlessly or until the 11th hour?

Less is the problem the author discusses due to "excessive testosterone" as he might call it but more the nature of economics and competition for access to any kind of resources imaginable, which is the very definition of politics itself. Replacing men with women will only mean the voices used to posture and speechify will be higher in tone.

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with one condition that is. The condition being that if women decide how all the money is spent, then they have to be the sole providers of said money. That is, make it so it is women's sole responsibility to pay taxes.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I do not agree either gender is better than the other at budgeting, and thus I believe that women are not better at budgeting than men. There are billions of examples to suggest this (Off the top of my head: Allison Redford anyone? She was the premiere of Alberta before she got booted for lack of spending skills).

Let's flip the roles for a second, shall we? Imagine women paid the overwhelming majority of taxes, while men got more of these taxes spent on services for them with virtually no comparable services for women. Now, let's imagine men were "better" at negotiating the budget. There would be an outcry for suggesting that only men should negotiate the state budget because of this.

After all, how fair is it to have another group decide how the entirety of a pie should be divided when they contributed only about 25%?

Conclusion: Only when women pay all the taxes would this idea be even remotely fair.

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