More Pinocchios for the President on Equal Pay

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Carrie L. Lukas:

Perhaps it’s progress that the president waited until the second half of the speech to trot out the must-have line about equal pay and the wage gap. Perhaps his speech writers just needed to fill time so cut and paste a line from dozens of previous speeches:

You know, today, 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.

Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

Yet they are behind the curve in using a statistic that is increasingly acknowledged as misleading. As feminist writer Hanna Rosin wrote about the 77-cent statistic inSlate:

I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case.

She goes on to describe – as those of us on the right have countless times before – that it’s the different choices men and women make (hours spent working, industry, fields of specialty, time spent out of the workforce, etc.) that are the primary drivers of the wage gap.

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Yeah, were it”equal work,” it would be ”equal pay.”
I have known women who forwent having children for their careers.
They each got equal pay.
But when you start then stop, let years go by then want back in at the same wage as men who stuck with it, you’re out of your mind.
I especially liked how Obama simply called on private businesses to raise wages.
As if it is just that easy.
The deli sandwich shop at the center of a NYCity protest over wages went under and fired all workers. The MAY later emerge as a burger shop. They couldn’t make the payroll they had!

And, speaking of cut & paste, a GWBush speechwriter pointed out numerous sentences stolen from SOTU speeches HE wrote for GWBush back in 2007. Obama will say whatever is written in front of him. Last night he parroted Bush. Probably unknowingly. He also slurred and missed his last syllables many times. Were the teleprompters going too fast for him?

Wrong again, but thanks for playing!

Fact-checking Obama’s 2014 State of the Union
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jan/28/fact-check-president-obama-2014-state-of-the-union/

@This one:

In pressing for equal wages for working women, Obama referenced an oft-repeated statistic that “women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.” PolitiFact has fact-checked claims about this statistic in the past. The figure comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is largely right depending on how it’s used, in part because the gap can be smaller for some types of work and other studies show the gap is tighter. (Your Link)

From another source:

The president once again revealed that he is still in thrall to Marx’s fallacious labor theory of value when he called for legislation to guarantee that women “earn a living equal to their efforts.”
In a market economy, it isn’t effort that counts, but productivity.
(And then there are the studies, such as those cited by Kay Hymowitz in The Wall Street Journal on April 26, 2012) showing that women’s aggregate per capita pay is lower than men’s because, in total, they work fewer hours, and that “childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers.”)http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/07/19/obama-strays-from-the-script-reveals-an-ideology-hed-prefer-to-hide/
http://blogs.forbes.com/kayhymowitz/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2013/02/14/obamas-state-of-the-union-was-well-designed-to-gull-the-gullible/

Obama said it was an “embarrassment” that in today’s American society women get paid less than men, ignoring the fact that his White House pays women less than men.
According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).
Obama apologist, Alan Colmes, defended the White House policy of paying women less than men and said President Obama isn’t setting the salaries for the people working for him.
Obama’s commonly repeated claim is false. There is no evidence that women are routinely paid a fraction of what men make for the same work…..

The Department of Labor statistic underlying the “wage gap” claim simply compares a full-time working man’s median wages with those of a full-time working woman, ignoring the many factors that affect earnings, including number of hours worked, industry, years of experience, and education, to name but a few. When such information is taken into account, the wage gap shrinks, and in some cases even reverses.

Another fact-checker:

Obama is using a figure (annual wages, from the Census Bureau) that makes the disparity appear the greatest. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, shows that the gap is 19 cents when looking at weekly wages. The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — it is 14 cents — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers.
In other words, since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics used by the White House may be less reliable for examining the key focus of legislation pending in Congress — wage discrimination.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/28/fact-checking-the-2014-state-of-the-union-address/

Perhaps Obama actually meant that female workers should be paid “more equal” then their male counterparts. That would explain the mathematical error in terms equatable to the “New Leftist Math”: That they are teaching our children, where it’s not the mathematically correct numerical answer, but the emotional intent that counts.

@Nanny G:

“This one” is a one way spewing device. His comprehension capability is thimble sized. He is clueless and his every post reinforces it. He simply does not know what he does not know.