Income Inequality: Blame Feminists!

Okay, I’m kidding about that, seeing as I’m a bit of a feminist myself, but let me explain.

The WSJ has an article about how one cause of income inequality is “assortive mating,” i.e. smart, ambitious people marrying smart, ambitious people.  As smart, ambitious women have held high-powered jobs, this has increased the gap between the rich and the poor.

Let’s imagine two traditional families and two modern families:
Doctor, married to a nurse, she stays at home once the kids are born: annual income, $300k/year.
Welder, married to a secretary, she stays at home: annual income, $50k/year.
The high-powered family earns six times as much as the blue-collar family.

Doctor marries a doctor; they both work. Annual income: $600k/year.
Welder marries a secretary; she stays at home with the kids because daycare costs more than she earns: annual income, $50k/year.
The high-powered family earns twelve times as much as the blue-collar family.

There is therefore *more* income for one family (because it makes sense for Mrs. Doctor to keep working), not the other (because it makes little sense for the secretary to work); this increases income inequality while having absolutely no effect on the income of the blue-collar family.

If you want 1950s-era income equality, then you should have 1950s-era families: everyone married before they have kids, and women stay at home.

Dictionary.com’s word of the day

Squib: inter alia, a short news story, often used for filler.

Slightly disappointing that none of the definitions included “n., a non-magical person born to magical parents.”

Amy Glass, Get Over Yourself

A young woman named Amy Glass wrote a train wreck of a blog post on Thought Catalog entitled “I Look Down on Young Women with Husbands and Kids and I’m Not Sorry.” In case the title isn’t enough to explain how bad this is, here’s a snippet:

Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business.

The following commentary is an adaptation of my comment on Instapundit’s thread about this.

Why it’s fun to mock Wendy Davis

For those living under a rock, Wendy Davis, the Escada-coat wearing champion of unrestricted abortion on demand, has some issues with her version of her life story.  Some people are fixating on the lies (e.g. at what age she divorced), some on how she’s a perfect hero for liberalism, and others (like the fabulous Ann Coulter) on how she’s giving gold-digging skanks a bad name.

Briefly, Wendy Davis claims to have had a hard-luck life, but, by sheer pluck, became a graduate of Harvard Law School. In reality, her father was a small business owner and her stint as a “single mother” came to a quick, lovely end when she married a rich older lawyer. Jeff Davis financed Wendy’s high-class life: he put her daughter by a previous marriage through an expensive private school, moved the family to a rich section of town, paid her way through private college and then Harvard Law, and raised her daughters (hers and the one they had together) while she pursued an Ivy League law degree 1,500 miles away. The day after Jeff Davis cashed out his 401k to pay off her student loan, Wendy divorced him.

(See what I mean about giving gold-digging skanks a bad name?)

Stacy McCain finds it worthwhile to keep this story on the front pages: it forces modern “feminists” to either defend Davis’ objectively atrocious actions or abandon her.

I find it appropriate to mock Davis for an entirely different reason: she’s no Sarah Palin.

Forty-One Years in the Desert

Yesterday marked the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the decision that forbade states from restricting abortion during the first trimester, and, with its companion case Doe v. Bolton, made it functionally impossible for states to restrict abortion during the second trimester.  The laws set forth in each case were later modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s “substantial burden” test, but the end result is that abortion in America has been functionally unrestricted for over forty years.

Yesterday was the fortieth annual March for Life. The twitter hastag #WhyWeMarch collected pro-lifer’s statements on why they travelled to Washington, D.C. in brutal weather to march in (literally) freezing cold to protest a Supreme Court decision that had been handed down over four decades ago.

I have only been to the March once, back in 2008; I took this picture:

Golden Capitol at the End of the Rainbow

I wasn’t able to make it this year – one trip in January to Washington was enough – but why I marched in 2008 and hope to march again:

That ‘blob of cells’ is a living human being, and, if you don’t kill it, will be someone’s best friend, someone’s confidante, college roommate, bridesmaid, bride, mom, and grandmother.

Target to drop health insurance for part time workers

We told you so, version 8,192: because of ObamaCare’s mandates and costs, Target is dropping health insurance for its part-time workers.

Only about 10% of Target’s part-time workers have enrolled in the company’s health care plan, but Target employs 365,000 people in total.  It is not clear how many of those employees are part time (the company would not say), but it stands to reason that over ten thousand people will lose their health insurance coverage as a result of this move.

Unfortunately for them, if Target had continued to offer health care coverage, it could have made the employees ineligible for insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges. Target plans to offer employees $500 per year to purchase health care insurance on the exchanges.

This is what we warned you about, kids. Whether by accident or design, ObamaCare was was written in such a way as to destroy the individual and employer health insurance markets.

McCullen v. Coakley

On Wednesday, I sat in on the oral arguments for McCullen v. Coakley, a case that brings a First Amendment challenge to a thirty-five foot buffer zone in front of reproductive health clinics in Massachusetts.

Back in the day, I was part of the team that brainstormed ideas for an as-applied challenge to the law. Even back then, we knew that the case had SCOTUS potential; but it was another thing entirely to be there in the courtroom and watch Mark Rienzi argue for the petitioners.  Suffice to say, it was an amazing experience and I’m extraordinarily proud of the team that made it to the Superbowl of the legal world brought the case all the way to the Supreme court.

Assorted comments on oral arguments and the case are below the jump:

(Unelected, unaccountable) Customs Officials Destroy Flute Virtuoso’s Intruments

From The Boston Globe: when Boujemaa Razgui flew from Morocco to Boston, via JFK, his thirteen handmade flute-like instruments were destroyed by U.S. Department of Agriculture employees. Razgui arrived, found out that his flutes did not, was given a phone number to call, and was informed that his instruments had been destroyed because they were mistaken for reeds.

The entire logic behind having an administrative agency is that the agency can develop in-depth, specialised knowledge of a field that Congressmen cannot.  The agency can then take that knowledge and apply it to a modern, complex society.  However, the Constitution does not provide for an entire alphabet soup of administrative agencies (it does provide for a post office, patent office, and copyright office, among others), let alone proper oversight of them.

I doubt that a single Congressional reelection campaign would even mention the destruction of Razgui’s flutes, let alone whether or not Congress is exercising enough authority over the Department of Agriculture or whether rogue employees are acting inappropriately with little oversight. That leaves Razgui, and anyone else caught in his situation, with no remedies at law or the ballot box to fix this situation or prevent it from happening again.

Of course, this is but one illustration of the ways in which an unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government is able to act with impunity. (As I frequently point out, as bad as the worst customer service is, you can either sue a company or take your business to a competitor. The US government denies us both of those options.)

Compare and Contrast – Treatment of Employees and their Families

In July of 1996, the 14-year-old daughter of a Bain Capital employee went missing. Mitt Romney took an entire team down to New York and personally helped to comb the city for her. (Even Politifact admits that this is true.) Bain Capital had invested in Duane Reade; the Bain team had DR employees put a flyer about the missing girl in every shopper’s bag.The Boston Bain office functionally shut down during the search; fifty employees scoured the streets of Manhattan looking for the girl.

Now another company is in a similar situation: sixteen-year-old Caleb Jacoby, son of the Boston Globe’s star columnist Jeff Jacoby, has been missing since Monday.  Here is the MassLive story; the Cleveland Jewish News; Wicked Local Brookline; and the local CBS website. As of the writing of this blog post, almost 48 hours after Caleb went missing, the Boston Globe has not written about this story nor has tweeted about it.

What Mitt Romney did was extraordinary and shows incredible character; while we cannot expect that every company will act in a similar manner, a newspaper is in a unique position to bring attention to the plight of a missing child. It’s job is news, after all.

When Da TechGuy talked about the Boston Globe keeping its liberal purity and not being like those Romney conservatives, I doubt he meant that the paper wouldn’t even throw out a mere tweet to help find a columnist’s missing son. But that is what has happened.

Too bad Mitt Romney didn’t buy the Globe; the full weight of the newspaper would have been behind finding Caleb.

Update: at 11:16 am, the Boston Globe tweeted about Caleb’s disappearance.

 

Objective and Subjective Reality

The Other McCain writes about the intra-progressive battle between “radfems” (radical feminists) and the transgender/transsexual rights community. (Here.) In the post, he mentions the concept of the “cotton ceiling,” i.e. lesbians’ lack of desire to sleep with men who have undergone gender reassignment surgery and live their lives as women. (For a full description, see here.)

In a conversation between a lesbian and a transgendered person, the following exchange took place (see previous link):

[Lesbian:] It’s not completely different to lesbians, and it’s not completely different at all. Lesbians are sexually attracted to females. This does not include trans women with penises.

What you say makes sense *only* if you believe the fiction that people with penises are *female.* Correct?

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:23 PM, [redacted trans] wrote:
Trans women’s bodies are female bodies, whether or not we have penises.

If the words “male” and “female” have any meaning that distinguishes one from the other, that difference must be objective, i.e. not merely in the mind of any particular person.