AUTHOR’S NOTE: While the blog post references the Republicans’ misleading attacks against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the salaries that her U.S. Senate staffers made, the author of the blog post is a Bernie Sanders supporter, and both Hillary and Bernie support equal pay for equal work.
Republican Wisconsin Governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker has, once again, made downright offensive remarks about women. This time, he went onto a right-wing talk radio show hosted by Adriana Cohen and effectively claimed that giving women equal pay takes away from men and compared women working and earning a salary to collecting welfare benefits:
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has gone on the offensive against women again, despite the backlash against his previous ugly remarks about rape victims seeking abortion. As reported by Right Wing Watch, Boston Herald Radio host Adriana Cohen asked him about the issue of equal pay for women, using largely discredited numbers to accuse Hillary Clinton as a hypocrite who pays her staff unequally. Walker could have scored the easy point on hypocrisy and left it at that. Instead he doubled down on why he finds it so offensive to be for equal pay in the first place.
“But I think even a bigger issue than that,” he said, “and this is sadly something that would make her consistent with the president, and that is I believe that the president and now Hillary Clinton tend to think that politically they do better if they pit one group of Americans versus another.”
Walker added that Democrats’ “measure of success in government is how many people are dependent on the government, how many people are dependent, on whether it’s Medicaid or food stamps or health care or other things out there.”
If you’re willing to listen to Scott Walker, you can listen to Walker’s remarks here. You can also view the Right Wing Watch piece that Slate columnist Amanda Marcotte referenced here.
Women earning a salary equal to their male co-workers for the same type of work is not a form of welfare or being dependent on the government; it’s being treated fairly. Full-time working women earn 77 cents for every dollar that a full-time working man makes in this country. Furthermore, working women earning the same amount of pay as working men helps men, especially married men in households where their wives work at a job that pays a salary or wage, because equal pay for women means a higher household income, and, therefore, more money for entire families to spend on goods and services.
To me, it sounds like Scott Walker apparently believes that women shouldn’t earn a salary for their participation in the workforce, and he also apparently believes that women earning more pay somehow threatens men. The former is absolutely absurd, and the latter is absolutely false.
The Progressive Midwesterner 