Democrats' desperate war-on-women-baiting
Obama with Lilly Ledbetter: A political embrace.
It’s an election year, which means the Democrats’ crass politicization of important women’s issues is gearing up once more.
Don’t be fooled by President Obama’s new push for pay equity. It sounds good, but it is nothing more than a political ploy to distract from the ever-conspicuous cloud of bad mojo following Democrats around as they brace for the 2014 midterm elections.
In the past few election cycles, a the left has done a masterful job of courting women by creating lines of division between Republicans and Democrats where they don’t actually exist.
Back in 2008, the ploy was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Republicans support fair pay for equal work, of course, but nevermind that. Democrats decided to debate — and put Republicans on the spot regarding — a bill that did not actually solve pay inequity. Instead, it merely lengthened the statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit. The law has since been criticized for being nothing more than a windfall for trial lawyers.
In 2012, the left resurrected the Violence Against Women Act — to direct hundreds of millions of dollars toward stopping something that is already illegal in all 50 states and punishable by law. No Republican supports violence against women, naturally, but many rightly questioned whether reauthorization was wise, considering that VAWA’s success in reducing domestic violence since its passage in 1994 has been negligible, the latest version even included protections for men, and the tweaks to the bill seemed primarily positioned to once again line the pockets of trial lawyers.
Obama with Lilly Ledbetter: A political embrace.
It’s an election year, which means the Democrats’ crass politicization of important women’s issues is gearing up once more.
Don’t be fooled by President Obama’s new push for pay equity. It sounds good, but it is nothing more than a political ploy to distract from the ever-conspicuous cloud of bad mojo following Democrats around as they brace for the 2014 midterm elections.
In the past few election cycles, a the left has done a masterful job of courting women by creating lines of division between Republicans and Democrats where they don’t actually exist.
Back in 2008, the ploy was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Republicans support fair pay for equal work, of course, but nevermind that. Democrats decided to debate — and put Republicans on the spot regarding — a bill that did not actually solve pay inequity. Instead, it merely lengthened the statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit. The law has since been criticized for being nothing more than a windfall for trial lawyers.
In 2012, the left resurrected the Violence Against Women Act — to direct hundreds of millions of dollars toward stopping something that is already illegal in all 50 states and punishable by law. No Republican supports violence against women, naturally, but many rightly questioned whether reauthorization was wise, considering that VAWA’s success in reducing domestic violence since its passage in 1994 has been negligible, the latest version even included protections for men, and the tweaks to the bill seemed primarily positioned to once again line the pockets of trial lawyers.
Here we go again. In 2014, Democrats are at it once more, introducing symbolic bills that don’t solve women’s problems, all to paint a ridiculously unfair caricature that the Republicans are waging a war on women.
By reintroducing political documents disguised as legislation that doesn’t actually solve a problem, and then screaming about the anti-women Republicans who have the audacity to question whether or not these bills are necessary or effective, they’ve turned women into political pawns in an effort to distract voters from economic policies that have failed women — and men — in nearly every aspect of their daily lives.
Under Obama, median household income has plummeted. Electricity prices have skyrocketed. The poverty rate has jumped to 16.1%. The income inequality gap has widened. Labor force participation has dropped.
The cost of college tuition is at an all-time high, as is student debt. And many experts are bracing for the cost of health-insurance premiums to skyrocket under Obamacare.
But never mind all that — the President wants you to know he supports women, and those meanies in the GOP don’t.
His two new executive actions on equal pay — prohibiting federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their salaries, and requiring federal contractors to report salary summary data to the government — will likely have very little effect on women’s pay across the board.
And the Democrats’ Paycheck Fairness Act, also being championed by Obama, may actually have an adverse effect on quality of work life for every employee, male or female. By tightly regulating how employers can pay their employees, it will become far harder to pay more for better work quality, productivity and experience, something both employers and employees should want.
Further, with decreased flexibility, working mothers will have fewer options, not more. Lastly, this bill just makes it easier to file lawsuits over pay discrimination (illegal since 1963), once again benefiting that singularly oppressed class of workers — trial lawyers.
But that’s better than nothing, you might say, because women still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Right?
Not exactly. The Democrats have been using the same flawed statistic for years because, well, it’s good for business — the business of misleading women.
The number comes from the average earnings of women in all positions, compared to the average earnings of men in all positions — not a side-by-side comparison of a man and a woman in the same position.
As Matthew Rousu writes in Forbes, “If you insist that the gender wage gap is a result of discrimination against women, here are a few other claims that must be equally true. By the same logic, young men are discriminated against in favor of young women. Women in their 20s without children out-earn men by as much as $1.08 to every dollar, according to some estimates. It must also be true that white men are discriminated against in favor of Asian-American men, who earn over 5% more than white men.”
What should offend every voter, especially women, is the Democrats’ phony insistence that these politically contrived “fixes” will actually help anyone, when really they are self-serving political tactics to pit men against women and Republicans against women.
Democrats don’t care about women any more than Republicans do. Fomenting hostilities between men, corporate America, Republicans and women purely for political gain is an atrocious abuse of power that undermines the intelligence of all voters.
So, women, don’t be fooled. You are too smart to fall for this again.
Contact Cupp at www.thesecupp.com.
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