Christina Hoff-Sommers: No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men

Article here. Excerpt:

'It’s the bogus statistic that won’t die, and the President deployed it during the State of the Union — but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns.

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.”'

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Obama, Biden, Hillary-- they know the truth re this issue. They are *not* stupid. Far from it. They have staked their electoral hopes on sucking up to the female vote. The reasoning from a strategic POV is easy to figure out: Half of all voters are female. Any time you assure half of the voting base that it is their "side" you are on no matter what, you'll win them over in droves. If Obama can secure just 35-40% of all voters this way for sure, the other 15-20% (or less) he needs is pretty easy to pick up, too. People obsessed with identity issues or who perceive him/the Dems to be more sympathetic to them than the GOP will vote Dem, 100 times out of 100.

At least, that's how the reasoning goes. And so far, on the national level anyway, it has worked very well. Obama staked his entire re-election campaign on two themes: keeping first-trimester abortion legally unchallenged on as many levels as possible and pointing out how insular and silver-spoonish his opponent was ("He doesn't get it!" -- *applause and cheers*). Despite the disastrous first 4 years he had in terms of getting anything done or even trying to keep any of his promises in a substantive way, the ballooning budget deficit and national debt, the ever-tanking job market continuing in parallel with a growing gap in incomes across the nation's social landscape, and his middling performance at the first debate followed by his clown-faced imitation of his vice president's similar smirky-face act at the second debate, he *still* managed to win the electoral college by a huge margin-- despite the fact that the razor-thin popular vote that he won by in 2008 got even thinner in 2012.

How did he pull this off? You saw the Dem nominating convention for what would be the second Obama term, I hope. He basically told the nearly all-female crowd that he was 110% on their side and that the GOP was poised to take them back to pre-Roe v. Wade. As for getting the other votes he needed, he simply repeatedly told the average voter that the GOP leadership would take away their social safety net programs and serve only corporate masters (as if the Dems don't!), leaving the elderly and sick to fend. (Obamacare to the rescue, just vote for me!) Tell me, are unions any better off over these past 5 years than they were under any other president? Was Obama a better handler of large-scale natural disasters than his predecessor? Has the national minimum wage been substantially raised? Who keeps getting richer and who keeps getting poorer? Is the national debt going up or down? Is Obamacare all he told people it would be? No to all these questions.

Populist my a$$.

Yet he still won in '12. Why? He told the female voters what they wanted to hear, so they voted for him. That's all it took. A speech bemoaning a mythical wage gap is all it takes to win many votes from female voters, and fear-mongering about abortion rights. Just promise you'll "take care" of them, and they'll vote for you.

But POTUS can't get another 4 years starting in '16, so why is he on about anything now when he can just coast? Simple: the '14 Nov. Congressional elections. Getting decent Dem majorities if possible in both houses of Congress would be a dream beyond hope come true for him. And, he needs to somehow put whoever will actually run for POTUS in '16 on the Dem ticket in some kind of position from which to launch.

Yes, he has a lot of stumping to do for '16. But until then, he has his golf lessons to keep him busy.

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