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“No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men,” Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute writes — and kudos to her printing the following in the mostly left-leaning Daily Beast:
President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. “Today,” he said, “women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”
One the very few times I’ll link to an article in the Daily Beast and tack on the Insta-phrase at the end to read the whole thing.
But as Hillary might say, what difference does the phantom wage gap make anyhow, when Democrats would prefer that the nation work less? At NRO, Rich Lowry writes:
The Democrats once styled themselves the party of workers. Now, they are the party of people who would have been workers, if it hadn’t been for Obamacare.
The Congressional Budget Office released a new analysis of the economic effects of the health-care law that estimates that it will reduce the number of workers, in effect, by 2.5 million in 2024.
This unleashed a torrent of arguments from the Democrats implicitly denigrating the value of work. Perhaps not since Southern “fire-eaters” attacked Northern “wage slavery” in the mid-19th century has a good honest day’s work been talked about so dismissively.
The old jobs crisis was people not having jobs; the new jobs crisis is people having to work. The party devoted to combating inequality is now blithely unconcerned about a law discouraging people — especially people down the income scale — from earning more. So much for its championing of economic mobility.
And note that this isn’t the first time in the Obama era that Democrats have openly thought that less economic output as a result of their policies was a good thing. Just ask John Kerry and Claire McCaskill.
Jimmy Carter, call your office. it’s time to help Mr. Obama’s speechwriters draft their own version of your infamous malaise speech, which exposed for all to see the dead-end worldview of 1970s-era Democrats, because it’s most assuredly back again.
Related: At Mediaite “S.E. Cupp Challenges David Plouffe on Obamacare Report: ‘This Spin on This Is Incredible.’”
And Breitbart TV, “Trey Gowdy (R-SC): Dems Trying To Convince Americans Writing Poetry is an Acceptable Alternative To Working.”
Hey as long as it’s cowboy poetry, Harry Reid will even allow tax payers to subsidize your efforts.
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