George Rebane
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid peeled off another liberal bon mot this morning – “Republicans don’t want women to earn equal pay.” This electioneering stunt is hoisted every couple of years, regular as clockwork in support of the latest Democrat sponsored bill that is a sop to class action lawyers and would kill jobs for women. BTW, it’s also redundant since the on the books are two wide-ranging laws – the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act – that prohibit gender-based pay discrimination.
The populist ploy is rolled out regularly on the ‘fact’ that women earn ‘only 70% of what men earn’. That statistic teeters on aggregate payrolls and is intended for an innumerate audience suffering from logical lightheadedness. Actually, any pay gap that remains is explained away by a handfull of factors ranging from the professions women choose to the hours and years they remain in the workforce (more here).
All that doesn’t matter to the liberal machine when they decide to pull their populist levers. The current legislation Reid is showcasing would loosen another blizzard of regulations on businesses with women workers, requiring them to regularly justify to the feds that their women are not being discriminated against. This makes all the sense in the world to the political class that has no idea how either the economy works or how businesses operate. Businesses would naturally respond to such a law by minimizing the number of women they hire because the added regulatory burden translates directly into an increased cost of women’s labor in the workplace. The result is fewer jobs for women. (The astute reader will recognize that this is just another version of the eternal truth that you get less of what is taxed more.)
But the point I want to make in this report is that the liberal establishment considers women to be some kind of mental midgets for them to buy this propaganda pap. The denigration of women’s ability to reason is part and parcel of the standard applied by the Democrats on other social issues they sell to their constituents. Women are not supposed to be able to figure out what that 70% number means, what damage the latest proposed law would do to their economic wellbeing, and why it is trotted out every two years by the liberal leadership. To the Reids and Pelosis, women in the large are just a bunch of dumb broads who will swallow anything that comes in a bright emotional wrapper.
Finally, these Democrat theatrics have really one purpose, and that is to make their case that Republicans purposely seek to keep women as an underclass in America. Women are supposed to believe that Republicans are so dense as to continue pissing off half the electorate every two years by opposing equal pay legislation, and maintain an unfair work environment in which women are not treated on the merits they bring to the job. The final joke on Reid’s claim is the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009 about which President Obama bragged in March that it “ensures equal pay for equal work.” The liberal minds at work.
rebanesruminations.com 
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