“Stunned” by White House’s dishonest rhetoric on equal pay…

Is anyone actually "stunned" by the Obama Administration's lies these days?

When the current administration isn't busy trying to divide Americans along race or economic lines, it plays the gender card.

Today's Presidential pep rally.     (via White House Instagram)

Today's White House efforts, namely to call attention to a specious view that most women are not earning a fair paycheck (because of their gender), has been dismissed by large numbers of economists. In addition, it's also been undercut by the administration's own actions: It doesn't pay women staffers at the same level that it does male staffers.

Of course, this is nothing new. The Bliss Index has reported on this fact, time and again. But the news sure surprised the news folks. Check out the following video:



From The Cato Institute's online magazine, Reason: "White House Press Secretary Jay Carney doesn't like when you apply the same logic governing wages in private businesses to his employer's own payroll. As President Obama prepares to sign an executive order addressing the gender gap in federal contractors' wages, critics have pointed out that female White House staffers make an average of 88 cents for every dollar male staffers earn."

The article by Elizabeth Nolan Brown continues: "Carney protested that this was misleading, because women and men holding similar positions at the White House are paid equivalent salaries. Because women outnumber men at the lowest levels of the employee chain, however, the average female salary at the White House is lower. Carney is right: It is misleading to average the salaries of men and women in widely varying positions and then use this as evidence that women are being discriminated against. That women disproportionately make up lower-paid positions may point to some broad, systematic gender bias, past or present, but it doesn't equate to outright sexist behavior on an employer's part."

Read more here... 

So much for public service...

I guess it has come to mean, "the public serves the so-called servants."

The Cato Institute, citing a Wall Street Journal article, is letting taxpayers know that it can pay - in some instances, quite handsomely - to "do the people's work."

"Departing members of the House of Representatives awarded millions of dollars in extra pay to aides as they closed down their offices, according to lawmakers' spending records," according to the WSJ article. "The 96 lawmakers paid their employees $6.7 million, or 31%, more in the fourth quarter of 2010 than they did, on average, in the first three quarters of the year....Because most of the departing members were Democrats, fourth-quarter salary increases in 2010 for Democratic staffers were the largest in the decade LegiStorm has been gathering such data." (Full disclosure: "Republican staffers enjoyed a similar boost when many of their employers left office at the end of 2006.")

Nice work...if you can get it.