Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

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The “Equal Pay for Equal Work” Myth Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, April 10 2014
The real fault here lies not with Democrats — who have simply decided (not for the first time) that the truth can be subordinated to their quest for political victory — but with members of the media who legitimize this narrative.

I probably don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day.” I assume that you gathered with your friends and family to commemorate the fundamental injustice of America, a nation where, as I’m sure you heard ad nauseam this week, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Perhaps you even saw the President of the United States ostentatiously signing an executive order that doesn't actually address inequities in pay, but does the next best thing — collects data on the trend.

If the whole narrative smells a little fishy to you, there’s a good reason why. In 2014, it’s hard to find a measure by which women endure pervasive, systemic discrimination. Their unemployment rate was precisely the same as men in the March jobs report.  Women form the overwhelming majority of America’s college students. And a substantially larger percentage of women than men voted in the 2012 election.

How could it be that members of the fairer sex have managed to make such strides in the worlds of business, education and politics, yet still labor for only about three-fourths of the wages of their male counterparts? Put simply … it can’t.

It’s not that the underlying 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic is wrong — it’s just that it’s meaningless. The number is derived from comparing the median incomes of all full-time working men with all full-time working women. That measure tells us nothing significant, however, because the kinds of positions members of each gender hold — and the way they participate in the workforce — are dramatically different.

Women and men do not often choose to go into the same lines of work with equal frequency — and the professions that attract more women tend to be lower-paying. That’s not an inherent flaw, however, if it’s the kind of work those women have freely chosen.

We all make tradeoffs in employment decisions. Some people, for instance, will happily work for lower pay in order to have more free time.  Some others might be willing to work more hours per day in order to work fewer days per week. The number of variations on this theme is virtually limitless. The last thing we should expect from a system in which individuals are free to make their own choices is equality of outcomes, especially as measured by the single variable of pay.

Beyond choice of vocation, there are many other factors at work as well. Men are also more prone to pursue dangerous lines of work, many of which pay a premium for the dangers to which employees are exposed. Moreover, men tend to work longer hours on average. And women frequently take time out of the workforce for child rearing, a factor that can diminish the amount of experience they have relative to men. Control for all those factors, and the pay gap virtually vanishes.

Perhaps there are those on the left so desperate to find evidence that America is a country dominated by sexism that they simply seize on the “equal pay” myth without troubling themselves to scrutinize the numbers.  Amongst Democrats who actually work in politics, however, the trend is largely a cynical one; the veracity of the allegations is less important than their ability to drive female voters into the Democratic column come the November elections.

The real fault here lies not with Democrats — who have simply decided (not for the first time) that the truth can be subordinated to their quest for political victory — but with members of the media who legitimize this narrative.

Think about the intellectual implications of the wage discrimination meme for only a moment and you’ll realize how utterly far-fetched it is. In order to believe that women throughout the entire country are the victims of systemic bias, you’d have to believe that businesses across all industries — and all 50 states — are involved in implicit collusion to keep female wages down.

You’d also have to believe that there are no other firms out there willing to pay a premium to scoop up talented, underpaid female workers — this despite the fact that 7.6 million Americans work for businesses owned by women. It is essentially a conspiracy theory — and a rather dumb one even by those debased standards. If conservatives were to advance such drivel, the media would cover it only long enough to mock it.

Over the past century, America’s women have made remarkable strides toward greater equality and opportunity. A Democratic Party that really cared about the fairer sex would be championing that fact. This Democratic Party’s interest in them, however, is purely transactional. A less delicate observer might even be tempted to characterize it as a “war on women.”

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
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