The View: Say, Senator Hillary's pay inequality looks a tad bit "damaging," no?

The weekend started off with Patricia Arquette’s call for income inequality that used the repeatedly-debunked “77 cents on the dollar” statistics, and ends up today with The View’s hosts explaining why it’s bogus. What happened? Well, when that statistical standard got applied to Hillary Clinton, she didn’t even clear the 77-cent bar. Today, the hosts of the ABC show express their dismay over the analysis conducted by the Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher and how it looks “damaging,” while Whoopi Goldberg struggles close to the truth of why that statistic is meaningless in the first place:

Advertisement

GOLDBERG: Well, unless you know what the jobs were — were the guys, were the men who got paid more, where they in jobs where they earned — I mean, it’s hard — it’s like you, it’s like a bad fart. You put it out [laughter], and it wafts, and people go, “Oh! You did it, you did it!” Nobody knows! Is anybody telling us who got paid what?

No — and that’s why this statistic has been repeatedly debunked, as I noted above. That 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic derives from the population aggregate without any consideration of who’s working which jobs. Before the 2012 election, economist Dean Kalahar explained the problem in detail. Slate’s Hanna Rosin also debunked it as mainly (although not entirely) a result of free-will choice by women in the workforce, and that the actual gap was closer to … nine cents. Others put it closer to five cents. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler gave the White House two Pinocchios in April 2014 for continuing to use it, although that hasn’t discouraged them from doing so to this day, even though they fail on the same standard.

The problem is that Hillary herself keeps using it:

Advertisement

So yes, it’s damaging because Hillary could have addressed this herself while working in the Senate. Instead, the pay gap actually got worse the longer she stayed, with the final fiscal year’s gender gap being 37 cents on the dollar. She’s calling everyone else out for gender gap while being one of the worst offenders — and a look at the emerging structure of her team shows that it’s likely getting worse rather than better.

That may be like “a bad fart,” as Goldberg puts it, but we know who keeps cutting it — and it’s not Republicans.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement