WASHINGTON, DC — “The Institute for America’s Future continually claims that conservatives want to take America backwards, but what greater proof is there that it is the left seeking to halt progress than the tired project called ‘Reclaiming America,’ taking place this week in Washington, D.C.,” comments Independent Women’s Forum President Nancy M. Pfotenhauer.
“These special interest groups continue to trot out their rhetorically (and politically) powerful — but factually bankrupt — agenda. Yet an honest look at the data they pervert reveals their agenda is the public policy equivalent of fantasy football.”
Pfotenhauer was referring to the conference’s insistence, for example, that women suffer from a “wage gap” — yet, when you factor in real life variables such as age, education, occupation, full or part-time status, and work experience; women really earn as much as men. Or claims that women are discriminated against by our education system even though, since 1984, women have outnumbered men in undergraduate and graduate school.
“But the greatest disservice they do to America is their knee-jerk attack against one reform that American women desperately need — Social Security reform,” Pfotenhauer continues. “The current system faces an inevitable financial crisis, and they offer no positive alternative to the current system.”
Now, women are systematically under-compensated. Twice as many women as men retire in poverty, and women receive only 75 cents in Social Security benefits to men’s $1. As a result, married women who have worked outside the home receive the proverbial shaft.