Posted by
On the Right on Saturday, October 18, 2008 5:30:00 AM
Barack Obama has criticized John McCain's actions in the case of
Lilly Ledbetter, who sued for alleged pay discrimination. But if Obama
supports equal pay for equal work, why doesn't he do it in his office?
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When the issue shifted to the Supreme Court in last week's
presidential debate, Obama said he would appoint Supreme Court justices
"who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going
through." Not those who have a sense of what the Founding Fathers had
in mind when they wrote the Constitution. He wants those who believe in
a "living Constitution" that changes with the liberal fad du jour.
He claimed "the Supreme Court made it more difficult for a woman
named Lily Ledbetter to press her claim for pay discrimination."
Actually the Court did nothing of the sort. It merely said the law put
a time limit on filing such claims and that Ledbetter missed the cutoff
— by almost two decades. They interpreted the law to mean what it says
as written.
As Carrie Lukas, vice president for policy and economics at the
Independent Women's Forum, informs us, when producing the "77 cents"
statistic Obama repeats in a campaign ad, the Labor Department does not
in fact take into account factors such as years of experience, hours
worked, education, service interruptions for marriage and child
rearing.
Crunching the numbers, Obama's 28 male staffers were paid a total of
$1,523,120 for an average salary of $54,397. Obama's 30 female
employees divided $1,354,580 for a female average salary of $45,152.
Obama's female staffers, on average, make just 83 cents to the dollar
his male staffers make.
McCain's office, by contrast, is a feminist fantasy. McCain's 17
male staffers carve up $916,914 for an average salary of $53,936. His
25 female employees split $1,396,958 for average pay of $55,878. In
McCain's office, a woman earns $1.04 for every buck a man makes.