A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life

A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life
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I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, –that unless I believed, I should not understand.-- St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Saturday, February 08, 2014

The Reason Politicians Continue to Say Things That Are Blantantly False...

...is because "We the People" continue to be gullible, ready to believe anything that fits with our view of the world. If there is one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle and John Deere have in common is how effectively they spread the manure. If you took all the honest politicians from both parties and laid them end to end, you would end up with... well... a very short line. That is why fact checking websites are so necessary, though most, I am convinced, continue to ignore them.
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by Christina Hoff Sommers, The Daily Beast

No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men

It's the bogus statistic that won't die-- and president deployed it during the State of the Union--but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns.

President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. "Today," he said, "women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment."

What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president's mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. "There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons."
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The entire article can be read here. (HT: Scot McKnight)

(For another example, Politico reports on both sides cherry picking the latest CBO report in their favor. When the whole truth doesn't serve your purposes, fragments of it twisted with outright fabrication will do just fine.)

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