Do they say in the Windy City, Chicago: Don’t bring a tired, and rebutted, argument to a policy discussion? When, even if the did Dim Won, a/k/a Barack Obama would not understand it anyhow, from Dim Won’s State of the Union, 3014, via Robert Stacy McCain [1]:
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.
You know, she deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship. And you know what, a father does too. It is time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a “Mad Men” episode. This year let’s all come together, Congress, the White House, businesses from Wall Street to Main Street, to give every woman the opportunity she deserves, because I believe when women succeed, America succeeds.
Maybe Dim Won just didn’t say deserve often enough? Simply saying the word deserve, over and over, does not make it so.
Reax:
So here we have a myth (women “still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns”), a slogan (“equal pay for equal work”), and a number of vague rhetorical gestures toward policy to overcome a mythical disparity in accordance with an egalitarian slogan.
Thomas Sowell, 2008, video:
Hat tip video and reax, Scott Johnson, Powerline [2]:
Thomas Sowell has made a cottage industry of debunking this bogus statistic. Dean Kalahar drew on Sowell’s research for the 2012 column “The female wage gap is a major economic myth.” [3] Most recently, this past August, feminist Hanna Rosin joined the party in the Slate column “The gender wage gap lie.” [4]
Men and women are different. They make different decisions with different economic outcomes.