Senate Democrats Can’t Pass a Budget Because They’re Too Busy Setting Traps for Republicans

In case you were wondering why the Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget, this is the reason. They’re too busy setting traps for their political adversaries. (Well, that, and they don’t want the public to know what they have in store for us.) These people are shameless.

Senate Democrats are planning a new ploy to put Mitt Romney and Republicans on the defensive with female voters.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will bring to the floor in coming weeks legislation to protect women from retaliation by employers if they inquire about salaries paid to male colleagues.

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“Romney’s going to be on defense on the Paycheck Fairness Act,” said a senior Democratic aide.

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The bill would prohibit employer discrimination for inquiring about, discussing or disclosing the wages of another employee.

It would expand the definition of wage discrimination by allowing employees to compare the pay of male colleagues not only within the same office but also with colleagues in other local offices. A female employee could allege wage discrimination if she is paid less than a male working the same job for the same employer across town. (Read More)

What if the man just happens to be a better worker? What if they find out women at a certain company are paid more, can the men sue? And is there really discrimination in pay based on gender? A new study refutes those claims.

One stubborn fact of the labor market argues against the idea. That is the gender-hours gap, close cousin of the gender-wage gap. Most people have heard that full-time working American women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yet these numbers don’t take into account the actual number of hours worked. And it turns out that women work fewer hours than men.

The Labor Department defines full-time as 35 hours a week or more, and the “or more” is far more likely to refer to male workers than to female ones. According to the department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.

The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage. (Read More)

Either way, thanks to the rotten economy the gender gap is closing.

Men continue to take a bigger hit in their paychecks than women because of lingering effects of the Great Recession, according to a study by the Conference Board.

Average wages for women remain lower than those for their male counterparts, by nearly 20%. But men’s wages have been much slower to rebound from the effects of the recession, which had its most severe impact on male-dominated industries, such as construction, the study found.

Although the recession technically ended in 2009, men’s wage growth had rebounded to half the average rate of the previous decade by last year. Meanwhile, the growth in wages for women had almost fully recovered, the study said. (Read More)

So basically, this is another non-issue the Democrats are bringing up so they can howl about the Republicans waging a war on women. And the Democrats still haven’t passed a budget.

Update: Linked by Doug Ross - thanks!