President Barack Obama’s spokesman and his chief economic advisor stomped on his critical “gender pay gap” campaign theme as they rushed to defend his huge Obamacare network from a damaging new report.
Obamacare is good because it allows a spouse to work fewer hours so he or she can devote more time to other activities such as childrearing, White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a Tuesday press briefing.
Obamacare “creates an opportunity that has a net benefit for that family, for the community, and broadly speaking… creating that kind of choice for people [to take a lower-paid job] is a good thing,” he said.
“What’s with the White House suddenly doing an about-face on the gender pay gap issue?” asked Janice Shaw Crouse, the director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute at the conservative Concerned Women for America.
“First the President bemoans the supposed gender pay gap in his State of the Union speech, using that as evidence of the ‘war on women'” and of deliberate discrimination, she told The Daily Caller.
“Now they are explaining low labor force participation as [people] making a deliberate choice to drop out” of work, she said. But “if there’s a choice in a family, in all likelihood the wife will be the one to go part-time,” while the husband works full-time, she said.
“It is outrageous for [Obama] to turn around after the CBO report to try to convince the public that the unintended consequences of his policies — lower-paying part-time work and 2 million jobs lost — are actually going to prove beneficial to women, said Crouse.
Carney’s boss is claiming that invidious sexual discrimination has pushed women’s wages down to 77 cents for every dollar made by men, regardless of women’s choices.
“Today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” Obama claimed in the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech. “That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment,” he said. “It is time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‘Mad Men’ episode,” he said.
“This year, let’s all come together — Congress, the White House, businesses from Wall Street to Main Street — to give every woman the opportunity she deserves,” Obama declared.
Obama’s pay-gap claim is likely intended to spur November turnout by women.
But many women choose to work that pays less, or requires less time, so they can devote their energy to other activities, including childrearing, say economists and conservatives, including Crouse and Christina Hoff-Summers, an author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The White House should stop using women’s choices to construct a false claim about social inequality that is poisoning our gender debates,” Hoff-Summer recently wrote in a tough takedown of Obama’s pay-gap claim.
An October 2013 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that only one-in-eight men worked part time, while one in four women work part-time.
Women tend to out-earn men in part-time work, partly because the hardest-working men have full-time jobs, but also because a higher proportion of college-trained women work part-time than do women who didn’t go to college, said the repot, titled “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2012.”
The pay is narrowing, however, partly because more women are working. Among full-time workers aged 25 to 34, women earned 90 percent as much as men, the BLS report noted. However, men’s relatively greater participation in full-time high-tech work tends to boost their salaries related to women, the report said.
Carney, and Obama’s chief economic advisor Jason Furman, inadvertently confirmed those criticisms of their boss’ campaign theme during the Tuesday press conference.
The two aides were trying to shift media coverage of a new report by the Congressional Budget Office, which said that the widespread availability of Obamacare healthcare would prompt millions of people — mostly women — to reduce their working hours.
GOP flacks and many reporters said the reduced workload damages the economy and is another cost of the Obamcare network.
But Furman and Carney lauded the cutback in hours, saying it will happen because some people — including mothers — use Obamacare’s benefits to take lower-wage jobs so they can focus on other tasks, such as childrearing or neighborhood services.
“Somebody who used to be in a job they didn’t want to be in, just because that was the only way of getting health insurance for their family, may be able to be in a better job for them,” said Furman, who chairs Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. “Maybe a spouse who wanted to be part-time so they could spend more time with their family, now is able to do that,” he said.
“There have been studies that have found that if two people are married and they get Medicaid, that that might lead a spouse who otherwise would have gotten a job and worked really hard to buy health care for the whole family might not need to get a full-time job, might get a part-time job and have more time to spend with their children as a result of the new option they have for health care,” Furman said in response to a reporter’s question.
“That is one of the types of choices that people would have now that they wouldn’t necessarily have had before, and that’s one of the choices in the types of studies that CBO is relying on in making this finding,” he said.
“Let’s imagine a family farm,” Carney said in response to another question about the CBO report. “You have perhaps the husband works the farm, the wife might work — or vice versa — might work somewhere else because she or he can get health insurance for the family through that job… [that] may prevent the man or woman from spending time with young children,” he said.
“Whether it’s the man or the woman in that family, the father or the mother in that family, who[ever] is looking to change an employment situation and has that opportunity because of the Affordable Care Act,” Carney said. “This is not anything but an added choice that they have that allows them more freedom… more choice and more opportunity.”
Carney downplayed the likelihood that the wage-gap would be widened when more women than men reduce their work and income.
But he acknowledged that women are more likely to do engage in part-time work. “I think the trends demonstrate more… fathers doing more in the child-rearing area,” he said, before shifting emphasis to families. Obamacare creates “options for that family… whether it’s the man or the woman in that family, the father or the mother in that family,” he said.
“It’s pretty obvious,” said Crouse, “that Carney doesn’t even believe his own [pay gap] spiel anymore.”