USA: Warum verkauft Barack Obama seine Wähler für dumm?

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."

Mit diesen Absätzen beginnt ein Beitrag der liberalen Feministin Christina Hoff Sommers in dem Blog The Daily Beast, das mit dem Magazin "Newsweek" assoziiert ist. Sommers erklärt nicht nur, warum es sich bei dem gebetsmühlenhaft wiederholten vermeintlichen Gender Pay Gap um Propaganda handelt, sie stellt auch die fast noch interessantere Frage, warum Präsident Obama, dem die Faktenlage eigentlich gut bekannt sein müsste, sie stur ignoriert.