Is There A Wage Gap?

An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal:

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap
By CARRIE LUKAS

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before. In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy. The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely. Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries. Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay. Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false. The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap. Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics. Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more. Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's. Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families. Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.

Ms. Lukas is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum.

Income Tax Unconstitutional?

Here's a thought that just popped into my head the other day, and I don't have an answer one way or another, so I was just wondering all of your thoughts on it.

Is income tax unconstitutional? Full disclosure, many of you know that I would personally favor a national sales tax, or FairTax, as opposed to income tax (I'll probably make a post about that at some other time), but I'm not really trying to push for one or the other in this post. I'm just looking at the idea of income tax in a new light, because taxation is taxation in one form or another, and whatever way we accomplish it, we can still have the argument over how much we should be taxed, so I don't really see this post as a partisan post.

First off, here is the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that explicitly allows for income tax collection:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Pretty explicit, right?

What I'm thinking is that the 16th Amendment goes against the 14th Amendment (amended prior to the 16h), specifically in the first line. (The rest of the Amendment deals with abolishment of slavery, which gives us keen insight to the intent of the 14th Amendment). Here's the first part of the 14th Amendment, which deals with equal protection:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

I specifically put "equal protection of the laws" in bold, because doesn't income tax go against that? It is specifically discriminates against citizens based on their accumulation of wealth. As in the context of the time, former slaves were being singled out simply because of their skin color and not given the same rights to life, liberty, and property. Fast forward to today, wealthier individuals are being singled out to "deprive" them of economic liberty and property (money).

Would not a flat tax or a flat sales tax grant more equal protection under the law, in that every citizen is subject to the same taxation rate under the law without discrimination?

For the poor, they (we) naturally pay less tax anyway, because either under a flat tax they make less income and are therefore taxed less, and with a national sales tax they buy less and buy cheaper items. Those are individual experiences outside the law, which under a flat/fair tax applies to all equally, and individuals are free to move up and down without any discriminatory change.

It is not the law's job to discriminate on any basis, but to afford equal protection to all individuals.

Here's another thought. If my argument were to be valid, that means that two parts of the U.S. Constitution conflict with one another (the 16th and 14th Amendments). What does that mean? Say, for simplification purposes, we pass an amendment that states, for example, "be it here deemed, capital punishment shall hereby be a legal and just means of disciplinary action in the United States."

Say 20 years later, we pass another law stating the opposite: "be it here deemed, capital punishment hereafter is found by the Congress and President of the United States to be an illegal and harsh means of disciplinary action in the United States."

This is just a side thought, but does the latter automatically invalidate the former, is there a repealing process? Any law students or more knowledgable people may be able to help me with this.

I would appreciate any thoughts on these ideas I was kicking around!

Hyphenating Individuals Divides The Country

Here's a sneak peak at my Collegian article that will run in the next few weeks:

Life is not fair. As much as we would like all aspects of the world to be fair in every sense, the reality is that the world is not fair, nor will it ever be. People in all walks of life have been blessed with various levels of skill, intelligence, talents, personalities and so on. We have a President and Congress now that feel everything in life needs to be distributed equally to create a government mandated, quasi-fairness. The reality is that no action of government can make everyone equal, because, by nature, none of us are the same. Everyone has strengths, and everyone has weaknesses, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, status, or any other “category” someone can be thrown under.

Splitting people into different categories and defining their issues for them does not work to better the country; it ignores the fact that everyone within these groups each has their own individual issues and strengths. Putting people into these groups (African-American, Latin-American, women, men, gay, straight, etc.) creates a culture of divisiveness, allowing an environment where one can claim they are victimized. Assumptions are made about a person’s beliefs and their issues based on the category they fit into, telling individuals they are victims based on their category’s particular injustices, rather than raising up these individuals as talented human beings, not just a target voting bloc.

Many of you will say I’m being insensitive to the plights of these certain groups of people. That I just don’t get it. Let me put it this way: we have all been screwed over in some way or another. We have all been discriminated against, to various extents. How many of you were cut from the basketball team because of small-town politics, because you didn’t have the right last name? How does it feel being left-handed in a right-hand dominated world? How did it feel when your friend got off with a warning but you were stuck with a $100 speeding ticket? Life’s not fair. Rather than feel sorry for ourselves and complain, capitalize on your individual strengths as a human being and be the best you can be, moving past the injustices of life.

We live in a more diverse world than is implied with all the labels we put on groups of people. Diversity should not be defined by the amount of people you hang around that are of different “classifications” than you. Diversity should be defined as interacting and relying upon people with different strengths than yourself, which in turn helps you cover for your weaknesses as well.

The best thing we can do is recognize each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and capitalize on those strengths, avoiding victimizing of particular groups of people. Categorizing people only divides us, rather than uniting us as Americans. We are each unique, which can be seen as unfair…but what are you going to do about it? Complain that you were given the genes you have and be an unhappy, despondent person…or will you take life by the horns and be the best person you can be with the talents you were endowed with? The choice is yours.

Once we move past classifying people and capitalize on our individual talents, that is the point where we will become a truly tolerant, colorblind, genderless society that sees people for who they are, not for what they aren’t.