Obama and the Fair Pay Act

[bomelia]

As Roscoe says, do your homework... read.

Obama flunks Econ 101
As co-sponsor of a bill that would bureaucratize most of the labor market, the presidential hopeful is flirting with a very bad idea. Fortune's Cait Murphy investigates.
By Cait Murphy, Fortune assistant managing editor
June 6 2007: 10:07 AM EDT


NEW YORK (Fortune) -- It's baaaack!! Yes, "comparable worth," which faded out around the same time the Bay City Rollers were disbanding, is making a comeback, under the euphemism "pay equity". To wit: the Fair Pay Act of 2007. Introduced by Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in April (Illionois Sen. and Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is one of 15 co-sponsors) the Act notes the existence of wage differentials between men and women.

This is true; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2005 female full-time wage and salary workers made 81% of what men did; (click here on "women's earnings" in PDF). What is more dubious, though, is the assumption that is the heart of the Fair Pay Act: that discrimination is the reason for all or most of the difference. And the act's remedies are absurdly misguided, injecting the federal government into the most routine pay decisions. The rest of the story...

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