77 Cents?

In his most recent State of the Union Address, the President repeated the Democrat rallying cry that women today still earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Is he correct?

According to an article at politifact.com, Obama "takes a solid statistic and describes it incorrectly."

Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution says, "If more men tend to be employed in occupations that pay higher wages both to men and women, then men may enjoy an overall earnings advantage even if all women in each occupation receive exactly the same hourly pay as the men who are employed in the occupation."

According to the article linked to above,

Indeed, if you look at men and women working in the same professions, the pay gap is much smaller (though for most professions, it doesn’t disappear entirely).

For computer programmers, for instance, women earn 95 cents for every dollar a man earns. For cashiers it’s 92 cents. For cooks and customer service representatives, it’s 95 cents. Other occupations have more unequal ratios. Women who are personal financial advisers, for instance, earn just 58 cents of what men in that job earn.

But, even if we were to take Obama's 77 to 100 ratio at face value, wasn't the first act he signed as president, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 supposed to have remedied that?

It's just further prove that anyone looking to Big Nanny Government to improve his or her life is looking in the wrong direction.