When Women Aren't Women

It's amazing what kind of stuff comes out of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Today's latest example is from Brussels where they are essentially trying to outlaw anything that might indicate that there is any difference whatsoever between men and women.

The bureaucrats are trying to acquire the power of censorship to suppress anything that might offend their sensibilities. They want to strip TV programs of anything that might perpetuate the stereotype of men and women being different. They want to get rid of the Page Three girls (yeah, good idea, tweak the British male just a bit more....). They want to censor advertising and most importantly, they want to go after the insurance companies.

They are offended that actuarial data the insurance companies use ends up paying smaller annuity payments to women than to men. They believe that without a shadow of a doubt that they annuities should pay the same amount, regardless of gender.

What they forget is that women often pay lower premiums than men, based on the fact that they live longer (and the insurance company can profit from the accumlated pay-ins for a longer period of time before they have to make the final death payment, if one is specified by the contract.). they also fail to acknowledge the basis on which an annuity works.

Let's say that a man and a woman, the same age, both begin taking payments from an annuity at the exact same time. They both have the same amount in their annuity fund when the payments commence. The man's payment will be higher. Why?

The insurance company is using actuarial data which says that men have shorter lives than women. The idea of the annuity is that the annuity fund is reaches zero on the data when statistics say the insured will die. If the initial pool of funds are the same for both the man and the woman, the woman's longer life span indicates that she has to receive less in each payment in order to stretch the money over a longer period of time as the goal is still for the annuity funds to zero out as you die.

The insurance compeny is essentially betting that you will die on or before the data statistics say you will. If you live longer, the insurance company will lose money on you, an amount that increases with every payment.

So what would happen if the payments were normalized genderwise? One of two things:

One, men would receive less than their paid in amount for annuities. Insurance companies would begin calculating payouts based solely on the female lifespan. Men would get cheated out of money and nothing would change, save psychologically, for women.

Or two, women would pay a higher premium than they currently do so that the annuity payout could be maintained at the current level of the male payout structure. In that case, women would pay more now, to receive the same amount later, but still with the annuity zeroing on the expected date of death.

The second option would seem to be the more fair of the two, as women would pay a higher amount now for their extended benefits later, but I would see the bureaucrats in Brussels implementing the first plan instead. Why do I see this?

Simple, they would then find a way to tax the excess paid in amount of the male annuity funds on the death of the insured. It would screw the men, screw their families and the insurance companies, all while being implemented as a sop to "gender equalization."

It is every socialist-feminist's dream.