Statistical Frauds of the Left

 

Liberals’ “war on women” consists of talking points to excite the gullible.

By Thomas Sowell

The “war on women” political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.
It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent 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 — something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues.
What if you compare women and men who are the same on all the relevant characteristics?
First of all, you can seldom do that, because the statistics you would need are not always available for the whole range of occupations and the whole range of differences between women’s patterns and men’s patterns in the labor market.
Even where relevant statistics are available, careful judgment is required to pick samples of women and men who are truly comparable.
For example, 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, when you stop and think about it.
How surprising is it that women with children do not earn as much as women 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, just the opposite of the situation with women? 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?
More than 90 percent 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.
During my research on male-female differences for my book Economic Facts and Fallacies, I was amazed to learn that young male doctors earned much higher incomes than young female doctors. But it wasn’t so amazing after I discovered that young male doctors worked over 500 hours more per year than young female doctors.
Even when women and men work at jobs that have the same title — whether doctors, lawyers, economists, or whatever — people do not get paid for what their job title is, but for what they actually do.
Women lawyers who are pregnant, or who have young children, may have good reasons to prefer a 9-to-5 job in a government agency to working 60 hours a week in a high-powered law firm. But there is no point comparing male lawyers as a group with female lawyers as a group, if you don’t look any deeper than job titles.
Unless, of course, you are not looking for the truth, but for political talking points to excite the gullible.
Even when you compare women and men with the “same” education, as measured by college or university degrees, the women usually specialize in a very different mix of subjects, with very different income-earning potentials.
Although comparing women and men who are in fact comparable is not easy to do, when you look at women and men who are similar on multiple factors, the sex differential in pay shrinks drastically and gets close to the vanishing point. In some categories, women earn more than men with the same range of characteristics.
If the 77 percent statistic were for real, employers would be paying 30 percent more than they had to every time they hired a man to do a job that a woman could do just as well. Would employers be such fools with their own money? If you think employers don’t care about paying 30 percent more than they have to, just go ask your boss for a 30 percent raise!

The Case for a Little Sedition

The Bundy standoff reminds us that government is our servant, not our master.
 

By Kevin D. Williamson 

 

A great deal of the discussion about the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and the BLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.

Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.

But not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.” And there is a price to pay for that, too: King George not only would have been well within his legal rights to hang every one of this nation’s seditious Founding Fathers, he would have been duty-bound to do so, the keeping of the civil peace being the first responsibility of the civil authority. Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers? The situation was less dramatic during the government shutdown, but every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.

Harry Reid, apparently eager for somebody to play the role of General Dyer in this civil-disobedience drama, promises that this is “not over.” And, in a sense, it can’t be over: The theory of modern government is fundamentally Hobbesian in its insistence that where political obedience is demanded, that demand must be satisfied lest we regress into bellum omnium contra omnes. I myself am of the view that there is a great deal of real estate between complete submission and civil war, and that acts such as Mr. Bundy’s are not only bearable in a free republic but positively salubrious. Unhappily, those views are not shared by many in Washington, and, if I were a wagering sort, my money would be on Mr. Bundy ending up dead or in prison, with a slight bias in the odds toward death.

Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington both were British subjects who believed that their legal situation was at odds with something deeper and more meaningful, and that the British were a legal authority but an alien power. (Washington is not really so much closer to London than New Delhi is.) Mr. Bundy is tapping into a longstanding tendency in the American West to view the federal government as a creature of the Eastern establishment, with political and economic interests that are inimical to those of the West and its people. And it is not as though there is no evidence supporting that suspicion. The federal government controls 87 percent of the land in Nevada, something that would be unheard-of in any state east of Colorado. Uncle Sam owns less than 1 percent of the land in New York, 1 percent of Maine, less than 1 percent of Rhode Island, less than 1 percent of Connecticut, but nearly half of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, more than half of Utah and Idaho, and is practically a monopolist in Nevada. And a monopolist is rarely a good and honest negotiating partner. The original Sagebrush rebels objected to conservation rules written by Eastern environmentalists who had never so much as set foot in the lands they were disposing of; a century and some later, people travel more, but the underlying dynamic is the same.

There are of course questions of prudence and proportion to be answered here, and though I note that he uses the very strong phrase “lawless government,” I sympathize with Mr. Lowry’s desire that both sides should follow the law. But there is a more important question here: Is government our servant, or is it our master? The Left has long ago answered that question to the satisfaction of its partisans, who are happy to be serfs so long as their birth control is subsidized. But the Right always struggles with that question, as it must. The thing that conservatives seek to conserve is the American order, which 1) insists that we are to be governed by laws rather than by men and 2) was born in a violent revolution. Russell Kirk described the conservative ideal as “ordered liberty,” and that is indeed what we must aim for — keeping in mind that it is order that serves liberty, not the other way around. And it is the government that exists at the sufferance of the people, including such irascible ones as Mr. Bundy, not the other way around.

If the conservatives in official Washington want to do something other than stand by and look impotent, they might consider pressing for legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process. Even the Obama administration has identified a very large portfolio of office buildings and other federal holdings that are unused or under-used. By some estimates, superfluous federal holdings amount to trillions of dollars in value. Surely not every inch of that 87 percent of Nevada under the absentee-landlordship of the federal government is critical to the national interest. Perhaps Mr. Bundy would like to buy some land where he can graze his cattle.

Prudential measures do not solve questions of principle. So where does that leave us with our judgment of the Nevada insurrection? Perhaps with an understanding that while Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action, it is nonetheless the case that, in measured doses, a little sedition is an excellent thing.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

'Race card' Holder is a disgrace

Silvio Canto, Jr.

My guess is that serious Democrats have to be horrified with AG Holder's comments about being treated "different."   We are watching an Attorney General who has no respect for the office he holds. He is acting like a partisan street politician rather than the top law enforcement officer in the US!
I agree with how John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky describe AG Holder's tenure:

"A veteran Justice Department lawyer says that Attorney General Eric Holder has politicized the department in a way he hadn’t seen before. In short, “Holder is the worst person to hold the position of attorney general since the disgraced John Mitchell.”
Now in his sixth year as attorney general, Holder has increasingly tilted the department in an ideological direction. It’s one thing to emphasize President Obama’s legal priorities. It’s quite another to decide not to enforce certain federal laws — such as the ban on marijuana — or urge state attorney generals to refuse to defend local laws on same-sex marriage. Legal changes are achieved through legislation, not through a sudden whim not to enforce them. No other attorney general has acted in this manner."

And no other Attorney General has ever accused his critics of "racism".
Remember Janet Reno?  Remember how she got treated after Waco '93?  Do you recall AG Reno saying that she was being treated differently because she is a woman?  On the contrary, she took responsibility for Waco and answered questions.
How about Alberto Gonzalez, the first Hispanic AG.  Did he "whine" about being treated differently?
From "Fast & Furious" to the "IRS," AG Holder has shown a preference for his side rather than the rule of law.  He targeted Arizona but looked the other way when California & Illinois issued driver's license to people in the US without papers.
On top of that, he has accused Texas and other states of "racism" because we want to protect the integrity of the election laws.
My father once told me that you can survive corrupt politicians but not a police chief.  In other words, those entrusted to enforce the law can not be corrupt or the whole system collapses.
Frankly, President Obama could do the country, and especially his administration, a big favor by telling AG Holder to spend more time with his family and leave public service.

How to Control the IRS

By Jon N. Hall

Americans despise and fear the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has been discriminating against, and has even persecuted, conservative groups. The IRS will soon be policing ObamaCare compliance with thousands of new agents.The IRS is no longer just a collection agency. The IRS even has its own SWAT teams. Something needs to be done about the IRS.
The way to get control over the IRS is through tax reform. Several tax reform plans, such as the one from the Bowles-Simpson commission, have proposed the same thing: ridding the Tax Code of its exceptions. Exceptions are the exemptions, deductions, credits, write-offs, loopholes, and gimmicks that allow taxpayers to pay less than their tax rates would indicate.
These plans are headed in the right direction, but they don’t go far enough. What they should recommend is the complete elimination of all exceptions. That would allow for the lowest rates possible that would still bring in the same revenue. Eliminating all exceptions dictates setting the new tax rates to their current effective rates, what folks actually pay. So if one currently has an effective income tax rate of, say, 10 percent, under the new system that taxpayer would have a statutory income tax rate of 10 percent. The new low rates would be levied against every dollar of income.
I’ve written about this tax reform idea here, but I didn’t give readers an idea of what their new tax rates would be. People may be surprised at how low their new rates would be under this idea.
Consider these numbers:-6.5, -1.0, 3.0, 6.0, and 14.1. Those numbers are the Effective Tax Rates for Individual Income for the five quintiles for 2005; (see page 6 of this CBO report). Now consider that middle number: 3.0. It’s the average effective tax rate for the Middle Quintile. Notice that all the above effective tax rates except the highest one are below 10 percent.
With our progressive tax system, even middle-income earners now have multiple statutory tax rates. One’s first dollars are taxed at zero percent and one’s last dollars might be taxed at 28 percent. Rather than paying multiple rates, what would be so awful about those making the median income paying a flat 3 percent federal income tax rate on every dollar of their income?
It’s hard to say exactly what the new tax rates under this proposal would be, but currently the lowest statutory income tax rate is 10 percent. From this Tax Foundation chart for 2010, we see that the average effective income tax rate for all taxpayers was 10.1 percent. And from this Peter G. Peterson Foundation chart for 2011, we see that an average effective income tax rate of 10 percent didn’t kick in until incomes got into the top 10 percent.
So it’s safe to say that for the bottom 90 percent of income taxpayers that they would have new statutory income tax rates below 10 percent and the median income earners would have a rate of around 3 percent.
Earlier this month, I wrote an article about the IRS’s Form 1040EZ, and how those who use that form pay the maximum tax for their incomes. The article showed that while the Middle Quintile had an average effective income tax rate of just 3 percent in 2005, an unmarried taxpayer earning the average pretax income for that quintile who used the1040EZ would have had an effective income tax rate of 15.8 percent, more than five times the average.
Under the current tax regime, an unmarried individual filing the 2013 1040EZ would have an effective tax rate of below 10 percent only if his total income were below $38,950. In Peterson’s chart, that income would place one in the middle of Middle Quintile. That would lead one to conclude that someone with a middling income can have an effective tax rate equal to that of someone at the bottom of the top 10 percent of earners.
Taxpayers who currently don’t take advantage of the myriad exceptions in the Tax Code, including all 1040EZ filers not taking the EIC, would get a tax cut under the system I’m proposing. Only taxpayers whose use of exceptions is greater than average would get a tax hike.
To keep taxpayers paying closest to what they’re currently paying, there would need to be more tax rates than the current seven rates. But that need not complicate. Consider the 2013 Tax Table, it goes on for 12 pages and lists tax bills for incomes up to $100,000. There are 2,062 sets of tax bills. New tax bills that reflect an expanded set of new tax rates could easily replace the Tax Table’s current array of tax bills.
If a transparent, streamlined tax system that makes tax compliance as simple as it can possibly be is attractive to you, don’t hold your breath. There are powerful forces arrayed against such change, and some taxpayers think they can’t survive without their special exceptions. On April 4, George Will’s column “A tax reformer’s uphill push” put numbers on the dollar value of certain exceptions, such as “the deductibility of mortgage interest payments, a $70 billion benefit disproportionately benefiting affluent homeowners.” (Why don’t renters get to deduct their rent?)
Americans want their tax exceptions. Why pay the full freight when others will make up the difference? If the elimination of all exceptions in the tax code were being considered, throngs would descend upon Congress to argue for each exception. Eliminate the other exceptions if you must, but leave mine alone. They’d demand an exception be made for their exception.
One could make a case for just about every exception in the TaxCode, but then we’d never get tax reform. The reason to get rid of all exceptions in the Tax Code is because if even a single one remains, more exceptions will be added. If Congress wants to help certain enterprises, fine, but do it outside of the Tax Code.
Take the write-off for purchasing the Tesla, the all-electric sports car. Those who would buy the ultra-cool Tesla would do so regardless of whether there’s tax deduction for doing so or not. On March 30, 60 Minutes aired a fascinating segment on the founder of Tesla, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk is an entrepreneurial visionary; America could use scores more just like him. But that’s less likely given America’s byzantine tax system.
What those who benefit from tax exceptions need to realize is that they’re being subsidized not just by the super-wealthy who get hit by higher tax rates, but also by the middle class who don’t use exceptions. Now, I believe in a system of graduated rates, where lower-income earners have lower rates. But after lower rates have been awarded, that should be the end of it. Taxpayers with identical incomes should have identical tax bills. Democrats are now droning on ad nauseam about equal pay for equal work; but what about equal tax bills for equal incomes?
If one isn’t visited by an IRS SWAT team, one still might have a healthy dread of our federal collection agency. Although it is an utter perversion of America’s system of justice, if the IRS says you’re guilty, you will have to prove your innocence; if the IRS says you owe them, you’ll have to prove that you don’t owe them. So you had best save every record of every money transfer you receive, and for the rest of your life.
The problem with our federal income tax system is the exceptions in it.The mission of Lois Lerner’s division at the IRS is to police eligibility for exceptions. By eliminating all exceptions, the IRS could be seriously downsized. Indeed, Lerner’s entire division could be scrapped.
By eliminating all the exceptions in the Tax Code, the whole focus of the IRS would change. Rather than spending so much time determining whether taxpayers get to pay less in taxes, the IRS would be focusing on whether Americans are reporting all their income. By doing that, the IRS might even be able to scrounge up some new revenue.
The Tax Code is the means by which the government tries to control us. The Supreme Court could justify ObamaCare only by invoking the power to tax. Limits need to be put on that power or the IRS will run amok. If they get power, Republicans’ first order of business should be to radically simplify the Tax Code and to fundamentally transform the IRS.
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.

GOP Amnesty: The Final Last Straw

By J.T. Hatter
The Republican Party is pushing immigration reform, and the GOP's new apparent political adviser, Chuck Schumer, gleefully approves.  Next, the Democrat senator will be advising the party on gun control, government spending, abortion and homosexual marriage.

We finally have a news cycle that exposes Obama and his socialist Democrats' biggest blunder, the absolute worst piece of legislation in the history of the nation -- Obamacare.  And the GOP's response is to divert national attention to an illegal immigration reform plan that most Americans adamantly oppose.  Is the Republican leadership insane?

The editors at National Review call the GOP immigration reform push "one of the most mystifyingly stupid misadventures in recent congressional history."  The GOP establishment (GOPe) doesn't need to be handing the media issues to flog us with.  The party needs to focus on winning elections, and that means flogging the Democrats with issues that matter -- jobs, Obamacare, and government spending -- day after day.  But Speaker Boehner is forcing the issue of immigration to the front burner, instead of issues Americans desperately care about.

"Day after the 2012 election, I said it's time for Congress and the president to deal with this very important issue," Boehner said at a morning news conference.  "I think it's time to deal with it."

John Boehner is bumbling around doing the bidding of the last powerful interest group who talked to him, the Chamber of Commerce.  Mitch McConnell is in hiding again, but he'll be in favor of whatever gains him the most politically.  Even the new young leadership of the Republican Party, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, are loudly hawking immigration reform.  And Juan McCain -- a GOPe former presidential candidate -- is champing at the burrito to lead the Gang of Eight back for another charge at amnesty.

It's Déjà vu All Over Again

It's not like we haven't been down this road before.  President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and immediately afterwards the United States was inundated under a flood of illegal aliens, which forever changed the character and face of America.

What were the essential elements of the 1986 immigration reform act?  They were to:

1.     Prohibit the hiring of illegal immigrants

2.     Provide new resources for border enforcement along the Mexican border

3.     Offer amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants already in the country.

Sound familiar?  These are essentially the same "reforms" the GOPe and Democrats are now pushing.  We've been there and done that.  Americans have the t-shirt, the tattoo, and the scar.

Can we believe the current House proposal would survive reconciliation with a Senate version?  Never happen.  Boehner currently says he won't support amnesty.  Who can believe him?  Who trusts Harry Reid and the Senate?  And who trusts this president not to interpret congressional reform legislation any way he choses?

None of the 1986 reforms worked as intended -- unless you're a Democrat seeking new voters to advance socialism or an employer eager to exploit cheap labor.  Back in 1986, the Act contemplated three to five million illegal aliens.  Today we're talking about a staggering twelve million more.  Here's what former Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had to say about the 1986 act he voted for,

"I thought then that taking care of three million people illegally in the country would solve the problem once and for all," Mr. Grassley said.  "I found out, however, if you reward illegality, you get more of it.  Today, as everybody has generally agreed, we have 12 million people here illegally."

For the vast majority of Americans, the 1986 amnesty was a complete and utter disaster, forever changing the economy, the character and the spirit of our nation.  The terrible damage it has done to workers, wages, our schools, hospitals, public welfare agencies, and society is almost unfathomable.  And now the Republicans want to help the Democrats do it again?

If You Reward Illegality You Get More of It

If Congress passes yet another "immigration reform" act, we could be rubbing elbows with forty-eight million illegal aliens in the United States by 2040.  Socialist economies in Latin America, as elsewhere, manufacture refugees.  Desperate people will flee to El Norte in vast numbers.  They will overwhelm us -- unless we end illegal immigration as we know it and impose strict border control.  We need to enforce the laws we already have, not create new ones.

Americans don't want immigration "reform" and we don't trust our government to do it properly anyway.  A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that just 39 percent of Americans thought immigration reform was a priority.  A whopping 91 percent said that job creation should be the government's number one priority.  In an article entitled, Americans Just Aren't That Into Immigration, the National Journal summarized the poll results this way,

When you look at the NBC News poll numbers, it's simple to make the political case for the Republicans who urge further reform procrastination.  The party genuinely does face big risks in pursuing this kind of partial reform.  A recent Pew Research poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believe that offering a path to legal status would reward illegal behavior, and 72 percent say it'd be a drain on government services. 

Republican Party Suicide Watch

Ronald Mortensen asks the question, "Will Boehner Lose the House by Shifting the Focus from Obamacare to Amnesty for Illegal Aliens?"  I believe we could lose the House, the Senate, and everything we hold dear.

Ann Coulter recently penned an article that likened the GOP's spastic lunge for immigration reform to electoral suicide,

As House Republicans prepare to sell out the country on immigration this week, Phyllis Schlafly has produced a stunning report on how immigration is changing the country.  The report is still embargoed, but someone slipped me a copy, and it's too important to wait.
Citing surveys from the Pew Research Center, the Pew Hispanic Center, Gallup, NBC News, Harris polling, the Annenberg Policy Center, Latino Decisions, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Hudson Institute, Schlafly's report overwhelmingly demonstrates that merely continuing our current immigration policies spells doom for the Republican Party.

Pat Buchanan has written several books that shed light on the destructive effects of our disastrous immigration policies.  He is a serious student of the issue and recently said that the GOP lost middle-America in part because of its immigration policies.

Almost all of those breaking our laws, crossing the border and overstaying their visas are young, poor or working class.  Between 80 and 90 percent are from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
They are Third World peoples.  They believe in government action and government programs that provide their families with free education, health care, housing, food and income subsidies.  

The Chamber of Commerce and the GOPe know full well their version of immigration reform means demographic suicide for the white majority and the Republican Party.  They know this. And yet they proceed with it.

The Final Last Straw

Is it time at long last for conservative voters to turn our backs on the Republican Party and form a new party?

If we rally around a new conservative party, centered around constitutional and traditional American values, we could be in the political wilderness for the decade or so it would take to become competitive.  That means America's de facto socialist party, the Democratic Party, will have free rein and complete control over all branches of government, the media, academia and -- increasingly -- over larger swaths of business and industry.  The socialists could complete the destruction of our constitutional republic in that time.  That's the risk we take if we say adios to the Republican Party.

Most Americans I know want a halt to all immigration, at least until we can gain control of what we have now.  We want the borders secure, immigration halted from terrorist countries, a complete halt to all U.N. refugee programs, and deportation of all illegal aliens.

I've been a holdout for years, believing we should try to reform the Republican Party because forming a new party was just too precarious a path to take.  But if the GOPe is going to betray the American people and undermine the future of this nation, then who needs them? We're no longer on the same side.

Amnesty is political suicide for the Republican Party and national suicide for the country.  Millions of conservatives view amnesty as the ultimate act of betrayal.  And if John Boehner, John McCain, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and their ilk, play into Obama's hands on immigration, we will turn our backs on the Republican Party forever.  It will be the final last straw.