Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said the United States needs to deal with the issue of women not being paid equally to men for doing the same type of work.
Harris made her remarks during a stop in Reno, Nevada and also talked about increasing teacher wages.
"Look, women are still not paid equal for equal work in America. We’ve got to deal with that," Harris said.
"We have to deal with the fact that we’re not paying teachers their value and all of our kids in public schools and want to know there will be teachers there who love them and have a passion for the work, but can actually afford to meet their bills every month," she continued.
Harris said if elected president, she would raise the corporate tax code, the carbon tax rate, and close "all of those loopholes for corporations, that include for the folks on Wall Street, that carry interest loophole, all of that. I’m shutting all of that down."
Rachel Greszler, Research Fellow in Economics, Budget and Entitlements at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in 2018 how the pay gap "is the perfect example of statistics gone awry."
"For starters, the data cited in the gender pay gap looks only at the median earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers. It doesn’t differentiate really important factors, such as education, occupation, experience, and hours, which account for nearly all of the differential in earnings between men and women...And finally, data isn’t the supreme indicator, because not everything comes with a price tag or pay stub. What is the value of a flexible work schedule; a job with huge upward-mobility potential; particular benefits packages; the ability to tap into flexible, sharing-economy labor platforms, such as Uber and Airbnb; or to access new business platforms, such as Etsy for additional income?
"It turns out that accounting for all these factors eliminates all but an estimated 3 to 5 cents of the gender pay gap," she noted.
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