Despite the many advances the women's movement has brought the U.S., what it hasn't done, thank heavens, is make men and women the same. The simple fact is--and there is nothing nasty or conspiratorial about it--the sexes continue to choose different avenues of study and different types of jobs.
Here's an illustrative example. The college majors with the top starting salaries, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, are: chemical engineering (almost $60,000), computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering. Men make up about 80% of engineering majors. Women predominate among liberal arts majors--whose salaries start at a little more than $30,000. Putting it all together . . . these differences--in choice of work, years in the workforce, and hours of work--could account for as much as 97.5% of the differences in pay between men and women.
Other differences? Men are more likely to work more hours than women; men are more likely to take hazardous jobs than women are, which is why more men are truck drivers, firefighters, police officers, construction workers, flight engineers, and coal miners than are women. And guess what? Dangerous jobs equal higher pay than, say, secretarial jobs. Again, it's all about choices.
Here's what the liberal machine will never tell its dronelike youth Zombies: The "pay gap" for women shrinks to ninety-eight cents for every dollar earned by men, after factoring in work experience, education, and occupation.12 And women in their twenties in big cities, including New York and Dallas, are making nearly 20 percent more than men in their twenties.13 You go, girls! In some categories, one researcher found, the starting salaries for women as investment bankers and dietitians, for instance, were considerably higher than men's.14
Is there actual discrimination in some cases? I'm sure that occurs. But the beauty of the free market is that the company that discriminates for the sake of discrimination will be bad-mouthed and the wronged employee can also go to a competitor. Moreover, the employee can sue.
But here's the grandest irony of all this leftist silliness. Did you know that while B.H.O. was a United States senator he paid his female staffers less than his male ones? Obama's female employees made on average seventy-eight cents for every dollar a man earned. In real numbers, women brought home an average salary of $44,953.21, which was $12,472 less than the $57,425 average salary that the then-senator paid men. It gets better. McCain's female staffers not only earned 24 percent more on average than Obama's gals, but they also earned more than McCain's male employees.15
Were the women less qualified in Obama's office than the men? I have no clue. Whatever the reason, McCain closed the "gender gap" without the force of government.
Oh, and here's another inconvenient truth: women's wages grew more during conservative administrations than liberal ones. In fact, the administrations of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush had higher "labor market progress for women" compared to the administrations of Clinton and Carter. For instance, women's "annual wage growth relative to men's" for the Reagan administration was 1.6 percent, compared to 0.21 percent for Clinton.16
Moral of the story? Liberals' economic lies have lobotomized my generation.
OUT OF ALL the mindless buzzwords liberals use, none is more annoying than green jobs, which is the third major economic lie liberals tell. Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. So far, he's allotted nearly $100 billion for green schemes.17
So what is a "green" job? Good question. Nobody really knows. I get these images of Captain Planet scurrying about tall buildings with a windmill on his back, but in reality, green jobs are a big fat myth--one that Obama Zombies wholeheartedly embrace.
You remember Zombie Jessy Tolkan, right? She's part of the faux youth organization the Energy Action Coalition, which pretends to represent forty different youth organizations on addressing "climate change." Back in 2007, Jessy and her cohorts initiated a conference called Power Shift, where they flew in around six thousand young people to Washington, D.C. In addition to reduction in CO2 emissions, the group's legislative demands included government "investment" in "green jobs."
While in the nation's capital, Jessy went on television with the granddaddy of all Zombies, Chris Matthews, to discuss the youth vote and climate change. On air, Tolkan continued with the usual lies about how our sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting, the wildfires and droughts are all the result of global warming, that Sarah Palin loves clubbing baby seals . . . you know, the normal liberal talking points.
Tolkan then declared: "It's an essential problem. It is my future. Millions of people's lives are at risk. This is not a matter of if. It's a matter of having to do it right now, without a doubt. I have to say, it's going to be good for the American economy. We have the opportunity to create millions of new green jobs."18
Marcie Smith, a college Zombie participating in 2009's Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C., argued that green jobs were needed to address "climate justice." She even had the stones to compare her global-warming comrades to the leaders of the civil rights movement! Marcie told CNN:
I've been working on a lot of climate adjustment issues from the local level, the state level, the national level, as well as at the international levels. And I think that that's one of the really, really cool features of this movement, in particular, is that this is a movement of profound and historic solidarity and reconciliation . . . you have the daughters and the sons of the civil rights movement, of the suffrage movement, of the labor movement. You know, and all of these sort of veins of equality movements are coming together under the banner of climate justice which is really, really important and profoundly historic.19
But we still haven't learned about all those green jobs and how they will be created. For starters, governments cannot create private-sector jobs; they can only move resources around. A government redistributes money within the economy. It doesn't create wealth; it only confiscates wealth. But if green energy is such a good idea, venture capitalists will produce it using their own money.
Green jobs are all bark but no bite. But don't take my word for it. Let's see how it's been instituted by our friends overseas.
Obama himself tells us that we should look to countries such as Spain that have "harnessed their people's hard work and ingenuity with bold investments" in green energy. So how's it working out for Spain? Thus far, they've spent almost $30 billion on their "green energy economy," which tallies to an average of $855,000 for each green job. Guess who foots the bill for these "green jobs"? You got it. The taxpayers.
That's some "investment," eh? Despite the fact that the Spanish government spends $8 billion a year to create a flurry of "green" jobs, their economy is actually hemorrhaging jobs.20 According to Gabriel Calzada of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, his country's "experience reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created."21
Let me be clear. I'm not against alternative energy. I welcome new developments. Freedom and innovation rock! It's just that politicians and the lobbyists who fund them shouldn't be using our money to pick winners and losers in the alternative energy market. That's a surefire way to crush jobs.
The sad truth is that U.S. unemployment is at its highest level in twenty-six years and climbing. Obama rushed through the largest spending bill in American history, commonly known as the "stimulus" package. But the stimulus package did nothing to spur job growth and investment. Nada. Zip. Nothing.
Look, if government spending were a magic bullet, the Soviet Union would never have fallen; it would have been an economic juggernaut, a model for our success. Moreover, Cuba, Venezuela, and every other socialist tyranny around the world would be economic nirvanas.
The green jobs movement isn't about stimulating the economy. It's anti-growth. Offshore, we have an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil.22 In oil shale alone, within the Rocky Mountains, we have an estimated 800 billion barrels.23 Alaska and the Dakot
as also hold billions of barrels of oil. That means we currently sit atop more than three times all the oil in Saudi Arabia, enough to meet our energy needs for the next four hundred years. But the anti-growth green people have made it illegal to drill.
For liberals, despite what they think about themselves, it's always about more control. They want to regulate and ration every part of the economy because they know deep down they are so much smarter than everyone else.
LEFTIST LIE NUMBER four revolves around one of the most treasured phrases in the Obama Zombie lexicon: economic and social justice.
Let's see how Obama lies about "economic fairness" and economic justice. During a primary debate, Charlie Gibson questioned Obama on the soundness of raising taxes on capital gains (stock values), noting that such an increase would likely lead to a decrease in government revenue. Gibson noted that in each instance when the capital gains tax was lowered, the government took in more money. In essence, lower taxes was generating wealth, not stripping it. Gibson then smartly asked Obama why he would raise capital gains, given that obviously there are no positive financial outcomes.
Obama's answer was stunning. He didn't deny the negative economic impact but said that he'd consider tax hikes anyway in the name of "fairness."
Now, we'll get into who actually pays taxes in a moment, but think about that for a second. Obama's worldview stresses that the profit system as we know it is unfair. In Obama's world, governments are economically responsible for their people; it's not individuals being responsible for themselves.
In his acceptance speech at the 2008 convention, Obama said that John McCain "subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy--give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is--you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps--even if you don't have boots. You're on your own." To Obama, the "promise of America" is "the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper."
Um, when did you ever sign up to be your sister's keeper, B.H.O.? Isn't your illegal immigrant aunt living in squalor in America? Why aren't you helping her, Messiah?
But I digress.
So where does all this Marxist economic bilge come from? Well, B.H.O. freely tells us that in college he hung around Marxists; for twenty years he attended a Marxist-rooted church, and he even titled his bestselling book after a Marxist and racist-inspired sermon. He's also influenced by Michelle "Never Been Proud of My Country Before" Obama. Here's our patriotic first lady holding forth on the virtues of stealing a person's hard-earned money: "The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."24
Here is where liberals don't understand economics. At all. When wealth is created, it's not a zero-sum game. Everyone benefits. "Rich" people invest, start businesses, and create jobs.
But liberals think somehow this all leads to greediness. "People before profits," lefties like to say. Yet it is exactly because of profits that people are better off! That is capitalism; it's the most successful economic system in the world, albeit one that is ruthlessly under assault by Obama and his bevy of czars.
Economic fallacies have hit Zombies like wrecking balls. A recent poll found that more than a third of younger Americans preferred socialism to capitalism. Another 30 percent were undecided on what was the better economic model. In all, only 37 percent of younger adults said that capitalism is a better system than socialism.25
Madness!
But it fits with the narrative that is foisted on the Zombie, that capitalism is mean and that government is compassionate. Far from it! The freest economies in the world have the highest standard of living per person. In those countries that limit government intrusion and overreach, keep taxes marginally low, and respect free trade worldwide, the people are the most prosperous. Socialist governments are the ones that must ration everything, from food to health care. Moreover, free economies, which any socialist enterprise is not, enshrine property rights and reward hard work. Ever notice how our "poor" people are fat and plump . . . with cable TV, no less?
Last year, Young America's Foundation intern Alyssa Cordova had a great idea to bring the inequity of "redistribution of wealth" down to a level her peers could understand. Armed with a video camera, she set out to interview students at George Mason University about what they thought about redistribution . . . of grades. In fact, she had a petition for people to sign that would allow the administration at her school to redistribute grade point averages. She brilliantly used all the Zombie rhetoric. She said that there are people who currently aren't meeting the GPA requirements to graduate, and there are people at the very top that don't need the extra points, so, in the name of fairness and equality, let's allocate those points down the GPA ladder. Alyssa continued by saying that it's not the fault of people at the bottom who may be struggling and working just to get by.
The responses to Alyssa's petition were priceless. Why would you take points away from people who earned it, said one student sternly. People who worked for their grades should be allowed to keep them, exclaimed another. Alyssa set the trap. You work for your grade. You study your tail off to get that A. It's yours. You deserve it. Then Alyssa showed her true intent. She asked the same people who just finished saying that grade redistribution was wrong what they thought of redistribution of income. Would these same folks support raising taxes on the top 5 percent of earners? Yeah, the Zombie replied even before Alyssa was done with the question. Another guy said the top 5 percent are "freaking millionaires" and aren't going "to miss those little bit of dollars" versus a person who doesn't make as much money. It's all different, proclaimed the Zombies. Alyssa, smelling blood, followed up by asking, "So you think it's okay to take from people who earn their money but not from people who earn their grades?" Exactly, proclaimed the Zombie. In the end, the Zombies kept saying there is no parallel, it's not the same thing, while in the same breath saying it's fine to soak the "rich." The YouTube video ("Petition to Redistribute GPAs") is a great tool to bring the immorality of government redistribution down to a level people can relate to.26
What Obama Zombies need to understand is that social justice is merely a euphemism for socialism; respecting property and freedom is the real justice, not what some little college kid or Washington bureaucrat thinks is unfair. What's interesting is that liberals are all for "spreading the wealth around" except when it's their own.
WELL, BOYS AND girls, the moment has finally arrived. It's time to bust a gaping hole in the fattest liberal lie of all--that the rich don't pay their fair share in taxes.
Tax cuts for the rich! Tax cuts for the rich! Bush just cared about the rich (and Halliburton)!
There is no limit to how far liberals will go to stoke the flames of class warfare. The liberal mantra is that the lower class pays all the taxes while the rich folks tool around in their yachts clinking champagne glasses while paying zilch. But, as usual, the greatest enemy of the Obama Zombie is the facts.
In 2007, the top 1 percent of earners paid no less than 40 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 95 percent paid around 39.4 percent. In other words, 1.4 million people shouldered a larger tax load than a combined 134 million people. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation underscored such inequity this way: "The share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers."27
Looking at the top 10 percent, that group paid more than 70 percent of the taxes required by the government! It's looking like "tax cuts for the rich" really means tax cuts for those who . . . pay taxes! In reality, the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay only about 2 percent of all federal income taxes.
Zombies, how much more do you want to slash the taxes
of half of all wage earners? They barely pay anything already.
It gets better. Every time a major tax break was passed, whether it was under Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, the left howled that it was a tax cut for the rich. Yet each time, the percentage of income taxes paid by the rich went up, and the percentage of taxes paid by the bottom decreased dramatically. In fact, since Ronald Reagan's historic tax cut in 1981, the share of taxes for the bottom 50 percent went from 7 percent down to 2 percent, and the share paid by the top 1 percent went from 17 to 40 percent!28
Crying "tax cuts for the rich" is a scam. The rich are shouldering the tax burden. The fact that the bottom pays practically nothing is no cause for celebration, but for concern. We have more and more people dependent on government largesse and yet the number of people paying for it is declining. We're becoming a nation of moochers and leeches.
And how about George W. Bush? He showered the "rich" with tax breaks galore, no? In reality, the Bush tax cuts initiated in 2001 and 2003, among other things, lowered the 15 percent rate to 10 percent, the 27 percent rate to 25 percent, the 30 percent rate to 28 percent, the 35 percent rate to 33 percent, and the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent.29 What is the largest-percentage cut? The one that went from 15 to 10 percent on the lowest income tax quintile! That rate cut was even higher than the one at the very top, which was just under 4 percent. The whole "tax cuts for the rich" was pure bunk, a lie that liberals shamelessly popularized.
These are tax cuts that Obama plans on letting expire, which means that every rate in every bracket would increase.
But rather than bludgeon "rich" folks over the head with a pipe, liberals should celebrate their job creation. Please point me to the poor person who provided you with a job. You know it's those evil rich people who have the money, acumen, risk temperament, and strategy to create jobs and employment for the rest of us. Bottom line: If you tax something, you get less of it. Slash taxes and reduce burdens of government, and prosperity will follow. Liberals endlessly excoriate the idea of "trickle-down" economics, blasting it as some scheme that just gets the very top wealthy while no one else prospers. The left's idea is trickle-down, too, though. It just uses the brute force of government to command where the trickling down is going to occur. There's no such thing as bottom up. If you think there is, go to the very bottom of the bottom--your local panhandler--and see how many jobs he can provide you and your family.
Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation Page 14
