‘Gender Gap’ Fraud Backfires on Obama By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gender-gap-fraud-backfires-on-obama/print/
Yesterday, a president apparently oblivious to his own hypocrisy teamed up with a Democratic Party eager to push the lie repeated often enough it becomes the truth.
On the progressive-labeled ”National Equal Pay Day,” that ostensibly represents the additional time it takes women to earn the same amount of money men made the previous year, Obama signed an executive order mandating that federal contractors publish wage data by gender and race to ensure they are in compliance with already existing equal pay laws. The order also prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who divulge their salaries to their fellow workers.
Senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett inadvertently revealed what this order was really all about in an appearance on MSNBC. “Employers also should welcome these new tools that they’ll have available so they can avoid lawsuits, because they’ll have the statistics to be able to correct pay discrepancies before it ever gets to litigation,” Jarrett said.
One is left to wonder how many man-hours employers will be forced to waste compiling data to serve their government masters, despite the reality wage discrimination has been banned by law since 1963, and the so-called wage gap that engendered the order has been thoroughly debunked.
Nonetheless, in keeping with his fellow Democrats, Obama was more than willing to promote the same lie he did during his State of the Union address. “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” he declared. “For African American women, Latinas, it’s even less. And in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.”
Those last three words are certainly accurate, and the president and his fellow Democrats know it. The so-called wage gap is the ultimate apples-to-oranges comparison, using data compiled in a 2010 report by the U.S. Census Bureau. The major problem with the report is that it lumped the data on all jobs together, making no distinction between professions, or other controlling factors such as experience, age, educational level, marital status or personal choice.
When such control factors are introduced, as a 2009 study compiled by the Labor Department analyzing more than 50 peer-reviewed papers reveals, any existing wage gap virtually disappears. In fact for the Millennial Generation, a childless woman in her 20s living in a metropolitan setting makes about 8 percent more than her male counterpart. The 2009 research corroborates a 2005 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Not that it matters to Democrats or the president. Remaining consistent with his fact-free agenda, Obama promoted another lie as well. “We got to make it possible for more women to enter high-paying fields that up until now have been dominated by men, like engineering and computer science. Women hold less than 6 percent of our country’s commercial patents — that’s not good enough,” he said.
There is absolutely nothing preventing any of that from happening already, save for one factor: the choices made by women themselves. A study compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reveals that of the ten college majors that lead to the highest paying jobs, men overwhelmingly dominate nine-out-of-ten categories. The ten majors that lead to the lowest paying jobs? Overwhelmingly dominated by women, in nine-out-of-ten categories.
This reality truly annoys Obama and his fellow progressives who have long dedicated themselves to the idiotic proposition that virtually every difference between the sexes is a societal construct, rather than anything remotely resembling a biological imperative. Thus a woman who freely chooses a career in the lower-paying field of Early Childhood Education, rather than one in the far higher-paying field of Petroleum Engineering, makes no sense to them. Or worse, such choices represent de facto evidence of discrimination.
Such de facto discrimination was precisely what the president alluded to when he exhorted the Senate to hold a vote on The Paycheck Fairness Act today. “So everybody who cares about this should pay attention to how the Senate votes tomorrow on this paycheck fairness act, because the majority of senators support this bill. But two years ago, a minority of Senate Republicans blocked it from getting a vote,” Obama said.
A majority of Senators are Democrats, who are more than willing to support this additional sop to feminist groups and trial lawyers, and Republicans who blocked it were right to do so. The Paycheck Fairness Act encourages class-action lawsuits, because it leaves defendants liable for uncapped punitive damages, pressuring them to settle as a result. Even more perniciously, it not only makes employers liable for intentional discrimination, which has long been outlawed, but for the “lingering effects of past discrimination.”
Those lingering effects will be defined in testimony given by gender “experts,” more than likely attuned to the American left’s belief that rampant sexism permeates our culture. If this effort succeeds, the market forces that currently determine what a job is worth, will undoubtedly give way to capricious definitions of historic discrimination.
The bill also authorizes the awarding of grants by the Labor Secretary to organizations that will teach the fair sex how to negotiate better wages and compensation. Such “fairness” leaves men, who have suffered far greater job losses than women during the current recession, on the outside looking in.
Three Republican committee spokeswomen pushed back in a statement, noting that the Act would do more harm than good. “This law will not create ‘equal’ pay, but it will make it nearly impossible for employers to tie compensation to work quality, productivity and experience, reduce flexibility in the workplace, and make it far easier to file frivolous lawsuits that line the pockets of trial lawyers,” contended RNC National Press Secretary Kirsten Kukowski, the NRCC’s Andrea Bozek, and the NRSC’s Brook Hougesen. “Ultimately, this bill will hurt all workers, especially women.”
The trio also illuminated the Democrats’ real motivation. “These are the same Democrats who controlled the White House and Senate for the last five years but always seem to wait for an election year to push another empty promise,” they stated. “The truth is the ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’ is a desperate political ploy. And Democrats are cynically betting that Americans aren’t smart enough to know better.”
Unfortunately for Democrats and the White House, an unusually attentive mainstream media was smart enough to notice the rank hypocrisy of a White House promoting a wage gap myth, even as they have a genuine wage gap occurring right under their noses. “The White House is getting…roughed up by its own pay equity rhetoric,” reported CBS’s Major Garrett. “An analysis of White House salaries, which nobody here disputes, shows that the median income of female staffers is 88 percent of that of male staffers.”
In terms of numbers, the median annual salary for women in the White House last year was $65,000, while the median annual salary for men was $73,729.
It gets even better. Garrett goes on to reveal the same White House that calculatingly ignored the aforementioned facts to promote the wage gap myth, falls back on them to defend itself. “Now the study also showed that men and women with the same White House jobs earn exactly the same salary,” Garrett notes. “Now the White House said its gender pay gap is tied to job experience, education, and hours worked among other factors.”
CNN’s John King piled on, calling the double-standard a “textbook case of ‘do as I say, not as I do.” CNN then played a clip of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s pathetic defense of that double-standard, in which he contended the White House “has aggressively addressed this challenge” before asserting that the pay gap there “is better than the national average.” “Is that the best you got?” King wondered.
Yes, it is. Democrats and Obama have long embraced the idea that the accumulation and maintenance of power is all that matters. Thus, if it takes lying, hypocrisy, contempt for the law and deliberately turning Americans against each other to achieve that end, so be it. Their desperation is amplified by the ObamaCare debacle, but that doesn’t obscure one over-riding reality: Democrats would rather rule over a bitterly divided and failing nation, than serve as a minority party in a united and prosperous one. In seven months, Americans get their chance to thoroughly repudiate that odious worldview. They should make the most of it.
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