Hans Bader's blog

The Tampa Bay Times’s fact-checker site PolitiFact is helping the Obama administration peddle a false claim about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which said that employees who wish to bring a pay discrimination lawsuit under federal law generally have to do so within 180 days. The Court, however, specifically left open the possibility that such persons could sue later on if they did not discover the discrimination until later.’

In yesterday’s debate, Obama falsely claimed the Supreme Court said Ledbetter could not sue even if she had no way of discovering the discriminatory pay disparity. He said “the Supreme Court said that she couldn’t bring suit because she should have found about it earlier, whereas she had no way of finding out about it. Unfortunately, PolitiFact parroted this false claim (which was also made by Lilly Ledbetter at the Democratic National Convention), in an October 16 post-debate analysis article entitled “Obama: Mitt Romney refused to say whether he supports Lilly Ledbetter Act.”  PolitiFact noted (emphasis mine):

If you restrict the supply of something, the price will go up.  It’s one of the laws of supply and demand.  Thus, cap-and-trade energy rationing schemes drive the price of energy up, by capping the supply.  President Obama has conceded that in his unguarded moments.  In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama said that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his cap-and-trade plan to fight global warming.  He also said that under his plan, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

But journalists are not economists, and often have difficulty understanding the most basic principles of economics.  (Some cannot even do basic math).  What is clear to any economist or any college graduate who has taken Econ 101 seems disputed or unclear to many journalists, who are more familiar with trendy fads in college English Departments, and left-wing critical race theory, than they are with basic economic truths.