Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly. . . .
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before. . . .
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.” . . .
(Yeah, this makes sense. When you need someone to explain economics, the expert you want to call is a sociology professor.)
Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way . . .
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Emily Liner attended Georgetown University (annual tuition $48,611) where she majored in history and French. A former staffer for a Democrat congressmen, Liner worked five years for a Democrat Party fundraising consultant, before going back to get her MBA at the University of North Carolina. She is now a “policy advisor” for Third Way, a tax-exempt organization which in 2013 had a budget of nearly $10 million, and paid its eight top officers a combined total of $1.7 million, led by president Jonathan Cowan’s $336,000 compensation. (Of the eight officers listed on Third Way’s IRS Form 990, only two are women. But maybe “gender bias sneaks into those decisions,” eh?) Cowan, who worked for Democrat congressmen and served in the Clinton administration, then started a gun-control organization (Americans for Gun Safety) that after the 2004 election became Third Way.
All of which is to say that this “news article” — published on the front page of the business section of the Sunday New York Times — is really just a regurgitated press release from a Democrat propaganda operation. This article is clearly intended to support the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign’s claim that the “gender gap” in pay is a real thing, which economists have repeatedly shown it is not. Controlling for various factors, including hours worked per week, women make about 95 cents for every dollar men earn, rather than the 77 cents claimed by feminists, whose answer to every policy issue is always the same: Vote Democrat!
Don’t be deceived by partisan propaganda disguised as “news.” To quote Christina Hoff Sommers, “this is a massively discredited factoid.”
A CMC student embarked on a hunger strike Wednesday that quickly resulted in the resignation of Dean of Students Mary Spellman. Much like those at Missouri, CMC students have complained about both specific incidents and a general climate of alleged hostility towards minority groups.
The strike was over Spellman’s response to an email from CMC student Lisette Espinosa, which according to critics showed CMC regards itself as a place for white, upper-class students who view all others as outsiders.
Espinosa had shared an article with Spellman she had written about feeling unwelcome at the school as a low-income racial minority, and Spellman had responded by saying she was working hard to assist students “who don’t fit our CMC mold.”
Tuition at Claremont McKenna is $49,045 a year. Whether or not students there “fit the mold,” none of them are underprivileged. It is an elite institution with an endowment of $700 million, and every student on campus is a beneficiary of enormous privileges that the vast majority of Americans will never have. If there are any Claremont McKenna students who are smart but poor — so that the high tuition was a problem — they could have saved more than $35,000 a year by attending the University of California-Berkeley, where in-state students pay a paltry $13,432 annual tuition. And yet a student at Claremont was willing to stage a hunger strike because the dean awkwardly phrased an email?
What the hell has gotten into these kids? A cynic might look at the recent eruption of campus activism (and by “activism,” of course I mean petulant tantrums) and suspect that these students are just young Democrats, warming up for the 2016 presidential campaign, the same way the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” protests were a warm-up for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Learning how to manipulate media coverage to control the political narrative is the most important skill any young Democrat ever learns at college, and inciting their fellow students to think of themselves as Oppressed Victims of Society will invariably add to Hillary Clinton’s vote total in the crucial 18-24 demographic. (“Look! Those evil right-wingers are trying to silence your voices!”) So the cynic may perceive mere partisan politics as the motive of these puerile tantrums, but is it possible that there really are larger issues involved?
“Million Student March” national organizer Keely Mullen made an appearance on Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” on Thursday and discussed her protest promoting free college, debt forgiveness and a $15 minimum wage for students.
When Mullen was pressed by host Neil Cavuto on how she finance this proposal, she stumbled with her response but eventually proposed a 90 percent tax on top income earners.
“Great question, I mean, you know, so — I’m not sure if you’re talking about a national level or per school?” Mullen said when initially asked.
“I live in a world and I see a system around me where there is a population that is doing nothing to contribute to the progression of society,” she added.
It is apparent that the simple question — “How are you going to pay for this?” — had never crossed Keely Mullen’s mind until Neil Cavuto asked her. To say “tax the rich” is an insufficient answer because (a) it is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the total cost of what the “Million Student March” is demanding; and (b) rich people are not just a piggy bank that can be cracked open and plundered for the benefit of whatever political movement proposes to take away their money to fund “the progression of society,” as Miss Mullen so clumsily phrased it.
Keely Mullen is majoring in political science but it would seem she doesn’t know the first damned thing about Basic Economics. Before any government can tax a dollar, you see, that dollar must first be earned by the production and exchange of goods and services in a market where consumers are the demand and producers compete to provide the supply. Wealth is the accumulation of excess income, and is deployed as capital in the marketplace as investment, where the owners of wealth — including everybody who has a 401(k) retirement plan — seek to earn dividends by owning shares in enterprises that yield profit. Whatever the rate of taxation, or whatever governments do with the revenue gained by taxation, it is the success of the market economy that produces the income and wealth that are ultimately the source of tax revenue. If taxation or other government policies hinder the growth of the market economy (for example, by disincentivizing capital investment), then government is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is the market economy that pays for everything, including the various government programs that already subsidize tuition for college students.
Is that too difficult for Keely Mullen to understand? I did not attend an elite college. I went to Jacksonville (Ala.) State University, where tuition even in 2015 is still only $8,790 a year. You could send five kids to JSU for the cost of sending one kid to Northeastern University, where political science majors don’t even understand Basic Economics, so how is it that a dumb redneck like me can explain this stuff? Perhaps it is because my professors were aware of how vastly ignorant the average student is. In contrast to posh private schools like Northeastern and Claremont McKenna, no professor at JSU ever takes it for granted that the teenager sitting in a classroom knows anything. Whereas the kids at elite campuses are treated like Special Snowflakes whose delicate sensibilities should never be offended — “Trigger warning!” — the student at Jax State doesn’t expect to be pampered and flattered by the adults who are paid to teach him the knowledge and skills necessary to earn his way in that frightening place called The Real World.
There are kids at JSU waiting tables and flipping burgers to pay their way through school, and those kids may never lead any national protest movement, but they will certainly “contribute to the progression of society.” Keely Mullen, on the other hand, is a useless parasite whose “activism” is about encouraging others to become useless parasites:
Student pursuing opportunities in community organizing and anti-racism advocacy work. My specific interests lie in the intersections of racial injustice and public education.
Oh, but Keely Mullen didn’t attend public school. The snowflake is an alumna of Chicago’s prestigious Francis W. Parker School, where annual tuition is $32,830. So this privileged parasite is now spending Daddy’s money to seek “opportunities in community organizing,” as opposed to doing anything useful in terms of providing goods and services in the market economy. If vicious brats like Keely Mullen are the future of America, we are totally and hopelessly doomed.
There is a looming domestic test of American exceptionalism. Case in point, the Commerce Department:
. . .how Commerce got to that 1.5 percent number is truly amazing.
Of the 1.5 percent, 0.45 of a percentage point came from increased health care spending. In other words, mandatory ObamaCare payments caused about one-third of the third-quarter GDP growth.
Without that forced spending, GDP growth would have been just 1 percent annualized.
But that ain’t all.
Increases in durable-goods spending contributed 0.48 of a percentage point to that 1.5 percent GDP number. Without that increase — on products like cars, refrigerators and planes, which are long-lasting — annualized third-quarter GDP would have been just 1.02 percent.
Here’s the bizarre part: Sales of durable goods have been in a free fall.
The Census Bureau, part of Commerce, reported earlier this week that durable goods sales in September fell 1.2 percent, after a 3 percent decline in August.
The only other month in the third quarter is July. And durable goods sales rose 2 percent in that month.
But how does an increase of 2 percent (in July), a decline of 3 percent (in August) and a drop of 1.2 percent in September add up to durable goods contributing 0.48 of a percentage point to the third-quarter GDP?
Read the whole thing.
We have permitted so much rank dishonesty for so long that something akin to a Great Awakening is going to be required. Where we locate the integrity to inject back into our leadership, and how the generally dishonest are purged from the government is entirely unclear.
I’m pretty confident that Her Majesty is not the answer we seek.
It was first announced that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras debt-ridden left-wing government would close banks Monday, but now they’ve decided the banks will remain closed all week:
Greek banks are to remain closed and capital controls will be imposed, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says.
Speaking after the European Central Bank (ECB) said it was not increasing emergency funding to Greek banks, Mr Tsipras said Greek deposits were safe.
Greece is due to make a €1.6bn (£1.1bn) payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday – the same day that its current bailout expires.
Greece risks default and moving closer to a possible exit from the eurozone.
Greeks have been queuing to withdraw money from cash machines over the weekend, and the Bank of Greece said it was making “huge efforts” to keep the machines stocked.
Greek banks are expected to stay shut until 7 July, two days after Greece’s planned referendum on the terms it had been offered by international creditors for receiving fresh bailout money. . . .
Eurozone finance ministers blamed Greece for breaking off the talks, and the European Commission took the unusual step on Sunday of publishing proposals by European creditors that it said were on the table at the time.
But Greece described creditors’ terms as “not viable”, and asked for an extension of its current deal until after the vote was completed.
“[Rejection] of the Greek government’s request for a short extension of the programme was an unprecedented act by European standards, questioning the right of a sovereign people to decide,” Mr Tsipras on Sunday said in a televised address.
“This decision led the ECB today to limit the liquidity available to Greek banks and forced the Greek central bank to suggest a bank holiday and restrictions on bank withdrawals.” . . .
The temporary closure of banks in Greece, and the introduction of capital controls, is very bad news for Greece. Greek people will have less money to spend and business less to invest; so an already weak economy will probably return to deep recession.
(More at Memeorandum.) Notice how Tsipras suggests that the creditors are being undemocratic, rather than admitting that Greece has been irresponsible? Tsipras obviously believes Greeks have a right to other people’s money, and that it is wrong for European creditors to expect them to pay back what they borrowed. Meanwhile the financial experts are getting worried:
The world will be unable to fight the next global financial crash as central banks have used up their ammunition trying to tackle the last crises, the Bank of International Settlements has warned.
The so-called central bank of central banks launched a scatching critique of global monetary policy in its annual report. The BIS claimed that central banks have backed themselves into a corner after repeatedly cutting interest rates to shore up their economies.
These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates.
Claudio Borio, head of the organisation’s monetary and economic department, said: “Persistent exceptionally low rates reflect the central banks’ and market participants’ response to the unusually weak post-crisis recovery as they fumble in the dark in search of new certainties.”
Two senior Greek retail bank executives said as many as 500 of the country’s more than 7,000 ATMs had run out of cash as of Saturday morning, and that some lenders may not be able to open on Monday unless there was an emergency liquidity injection from the Bank of Greece. An official with Greece’s Capital Markets Commission, the markets’ regulator, also warned that the Athens Stock Exchange may be unable to operate on Monday without a cash injection into the banking system. A Greek central bank spokesman said it was making efforts to supply money.
The European Central Bank’s governing council was expected to hold a conference call on Sunday to review the banks’ liquidity condition, said a Greek official, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The Frankfurt-based central bank said in a twitter post that it’s closely monitoring developments and would review the situation “in due course.” . . .
Euro-area finance ministers rejected Greece’s request for a one-month extension of its aid program, which expires Tuesday, shutting down any last chance for a financial stopgap until the referendum is held.
After withdrawing more than 30 billion euros as the anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, took power, depositors are now reacting to the latest twist in the five-month standoff with European leaders and creditors.
In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.
Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland — the other fiscal weak sisters in the Eurozone — may manage to avoid default, and the richer EU nations may be able to stabilize the overall regional economy. If so, the Greek problem is just a Greek problem. On the other hand, who knows?
Greece’s European partners shut the door on extending a credit lifeline to Athens, leaving it facing a default that could push it out of the euro after the leftist government rejected tough lender demands and put their bailout deal to a referendum.
Finance ministers of the other 18 countries sharing the euro met for the first time without Greece and flatly rejected its pleas to extend an expiring bailout until after the referendum on July 5 and setting the stage for Athens to default on a crucial IMF payment on Tuesday.
The 18 pledged to do whatever it takes to stabilize the common currency area and said they were in much better shape to do so than at the height of the euro zone crisis a few years ago. In a formal statement, they also implicitly urged Greece to impose capital controls to stabilize its banking system.
We’ve spent seven years in a slow, weak recovery from the crash of 2008, and it might be that the Greek crisis will trigger a worldwide recession. Riots, famine, hyperinflation — anything is possible.
Greek premier Alexis Tsipras has accused Europe’s creditor powers of issuing “absurd demands” and come close to warning that his far-Left government will detonate a pan-European political and strategic crisis if pushed any further.
Writing for Le Monde in a tone of furious defiance after the latest set of talks reached an impasse, Mr Tsipras said the eurozone’s dominant players were by degrees bringing about the “complete abolition of democracy in Europe” and were ushering in a technocratic monstrosity with powers to subjugate states that refuse to accept the “doctrines of extreme neoliberalism”.
“For those countries that refuse to bow to the new authority, the solution will be simple: Harsh punishment. Judging from the present circumstances, it appears that this new European power is being constructed, with Greece being the first victim,” he said.
The Greek leader, head of the radical-Left Syriza government, issued a stark warning that his country will not submit to these demands and will instead take action “to entirely transform the economic and political balances throughout the West.” . . .
Mr Tsipras’s article is a thinly-disguised warning that Greece may choose to default on roughly €330bn of debt in the biggest sovereign default ever, and pull out of the euro, rather than breech its key red lines.
The debts are mostly to European official creditors and the European Central Bank. The situation has become critical after depositors withdrew €800m from Greek banks in two days at the end of last week, heightening fears that capital controls may be imminent.
Mr Tsipras’s choice of words also implies that Greece may turn its back on the Western security system, presumably by shifting into the orbit of Russia and China.
The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher wisely observed, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Greek is effectively bankrupt, and Tsipras seems to imagine that he can blame this on Greece’s creditors. As much as that may suit Tsipras’ socialist ideas, it won’t produce any more cash. And if Greece stops paying bondholders, this would likely trigger a crisis in financial markets that would hurt a lot of innocent people who never set foot in Greece nor derived any benefit from the money Greece borrowed. Tsipras is reckless, irresponsible, and indifferent to the harm caused by his decisions.
Did I mention he’s a socialist? Pretty sure I did . . .
Okay, someone commenting on my last video scoffed at my assertion that unless our attitudes change, society will, sooner or later, reach a…well, let’s call it a “fempocalypse.” That is, that feminism will eventually help bring about an economic and social collapse.
Many people are simply unable to wrap their heads around that idea, because we’ve all been told, ad nauseum, that feminism is a cause of prosperity, when in reality, it is largely–perhaps entirely–a consequence of it.
“By prioritizing women in education at all levels, we have handicapped men’s ability to be as productive as the system needs them to be to maintain itself. By encouraging single motherhood and allowing women to banish fathers from their children’s lives, we’re creating half a generation of boys who risk becoming unemployable and expensive burdens on the system as adults, and half a generation of girls who are more likely to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem by becoming single mothers themselves.”
These two factors are interrelated. When you separate motherhood from marriage — by subsidizing illegitimacy and incentivizing divorce — you are consequently disincentivizing the behaviors necessary to successful marriage. That is to say, where women’s desire to become mothers requires them first to attract a man’s commitment to monogamy, mothers will teach their daughters (and other cultural institutions will support this teaching) how to be the kind of women men want to marry. Meanwhile, in a marriage-oriented society, men will strive to become the kind of men that women admire and respect, in order to obtain the benefits of marriage.
Break this connection, however, and the whole thing unravels. Men and women can behave however they wish, without really losing anything. If everybody is selfish and irresponsible, and if “society” (i.e., the taxpayer) enables these attitudes and behaviors, then why teach your daughter the virtues of the Good Wife? Or why teach your son to strive toward the kind of behavior necessary to attract and keep the Good Wife? Let him be a “playa” with a string of “baby mamas,” and so what? Furthermore, since women can’t rely on men to behave responsibly, “prioritizing women in education at all levels” is necessary so that women can fend for themselves. Why invest in education for boys, if males are just lazy, violent, selfish, unreliable creatures who contribute nothing useful to society?
These attitudes are part of a syndrome that is like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering momentum until, next thing you know, it’s Detroit.
The number of Americans 16 years and older who did not participate in the labor force–meaning they neither had a job nor actively sought one in the last four weeks–rose from 92,898,000 in February to 93,175,000 in March, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That is the first time the number of Americans out of the labor force has exceeded 93 million.
Also from February to March, the labor force participation rate dropped from 62.8 percent to 62.7 percent, matching a 37-year low.
Five times in the last twelve months, the participation rate has been as low as 62.8 percent; but March’s 62.7 percent, which matches the participation rate seen in September and December of 2014, is the lowest since February of 1978.
