Saturday, February 1, 2014

No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men

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

By now the President and his staff must be aware that the wage gap statistic has been demolished. This is not the first time the Washington Post has alerted the White House to the error. Why continue to use it?...

Obama’s State of the Union whoppers - Donald Lambro/Washington Times

...The term “cherry-picking” is often applied to the practice of presidents who use inaccurate, narrowly drawn, fuzzy statistics and claims to cover up their economic failures.

President Obama did a lot of it in his fact-challenged, State of the Union address Tuesday night, in which he made exaggerated claims that do not stand up to serious scrutiny.

The Washington Post ran a story the next morning by the capital’s chief fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, under this headline: “Sifting through some questionable claims by the president.”

The Associated Press ran a lengthy fact-checking story, too, with this editor’s note at the bottom: “An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don’t tell the full story.”

The biggest whopper: Mr. Obama’s claim that businesses have created “more than 8 million jobs” over the last four years....

Unlike Pinocchio, however, apparently Mr. Obama didn’t learn his lesson. On Tuesday night, he declared to all Americans that under his Obamacare law, he has been able to offer a banquet of health care benefits, while “keeping Medicare premiums flat.”

Not true, Mr. Woodward reported later that night. “They’ve gone up.”

Another whopper in Mr. Obama’s speech was his claim that he will raise hourly pay for certain low-income Americans simply by the stroke of his pen.

“In the coming weeks, I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour, because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty.

This is a cruel political shell game to avoid dealing with the fundamental causes of stagnant wages in a still sluggish economy. Most federal contract employees are already paid more than $10.10 an hour; in fact, often much more. It will not raise the pay of a single current federal worker, only new hires. It won’t kick in until 2015 or later.