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”
