CHAPTER EIGHT, THE DEBATE

President Obama accepted Tom’s challenge but stipulated that he only had time to debate one subject and he chose the issue of “Equal Pay for Women”  Tom said that he would accept the President’s terms even though it was a cheap political trick to buy the votes of women. Since Obama chose the subject, Tom offered to go first.

Tom said, “It is a statistical fraud when Barack and other politicians say that women earn only 77% of what men earn and that this is because of discrimination. It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same. Constantly repeating the “77 percent” statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people’s ignorance to buy votes; something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on other issues such as Health Care.

Some women are mothers and some men are fathers. But does the fact that they are both parents make them comparable in the labor market? Actually the biggest disparity in incomes is between fathers and mothers. Nor is there anything mysterious about this. How surprising is it that woman with children do not earn as much as woman who do not have children? If you don’t think children take up a mother’s time, you just haven’t raised any children.

How surprising is it that men with children earn more than men without children? Is it surprising that a man who has more mouths to feed is more likely to work longer hours? Or take on harder or more dangerous jobs, in order to earn more money? 90% of the people who are killed on the job are men.

There is no point pretending that there are no differences between what women do and what men do in the workplace, or that these differences don’t affect income!"

After hearing Tom’s argument, the President decided to not offer a rebuttal. He realized he had lost the debate.

Much of Tom’s argument was taken from Thomas Sowell’s book, “Economic Facts and Fallacies”