Larry Elder got it wrong today...

and I'm sure some of you think he gets it wrong almost every day. But today he really blew it when he talked about one topic.  He was talking about the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.  Now this bill has significance, because it represents yet another in the litany of broken promises by President Barrack Obama.  He promised to give the American people five full days to comment on bills that had reached his desk for signature, but signed this after only two days.  But I digress.

Elder was taking issue with the concept of equal pay for equal work, a concept where Lily Ledbetter was the victim of real discrimination but lost her case at the Supreme Court due to a technicality.  She didn't sue soon enough after the discrimination began.  This allowed employers to blatantly discriminate because as long as employees didn't become aware of their victimization through discrimination until more than 180 days have passed.  When the Court rendered their decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that Congress should pass a law that the statute of limitations runs from the discovery of any discrimination.  So the law was passed.

Now the "Sage from South Central" tried to offer a few strawman arguments against this concept.  He pointed out that Howard Stern gets paid a lot more than he, for doing the radio hosting gig.  But their two jobs aren't "equal".  He did the same with comparing the salaries of famous news anchors.  Again, not equal jobs.  Oh they may be the same on the surface, 22 minutes of news, 8 minutes of commercials, with about the same amount of prep time.  But those entertainers and news anchors he was referring to are paid by the audience they deliver, not because there is some disparity in the jobs they do and how they perform at them.

Lily Ledbetter was a supervisor at a tire plant.  A production supervisor.  Other production supervisors did the same exact work as she did, but they were paid $1,000 to $1,500 more per month than she.  That's discrimination. 

Depending on which studies you want to buy into, the pay "gap" between men and women doing the same work is somewhere between 5% and 8%.  Not insignificant, and still a problem.

Larry got it wrong.