Saturday’s Commentary page (April 12) was a feast for the careful reader. Mike Tipping’s essay asked why the multinational corporations making profits in Maine should not be required to pay taxes on those corporate earnings. If there is $5 million in annual revenue to be gained, why are Republican legislators opposed to closing this loophole?

Meanwhile immediately to the extreme right of that essay appears Steve Robinson’s essay that obfuscates a clear issue by injecting columns of numbers that are meaningless to the real issue. The list of disparity in wages of Democratic congressional staffers using averages fails to make distinctions about the work of the staffers or other conditions that might influence compensation (experience, responsibility), followed by a column of statistics about differences in career paths of men and women.

The issue of paycheck fairness is about reporting wages and assuring that discrimination based on gender does not persist. In the final analysis, Robinson is correct that the smart business executive will compensate the best talent regardless of gender, but he couldn’t resist disingenuous partisan politics on his way to that conclusion.

Robert Libby

Chebeague Island

 


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