Trump's Fed pick Moore says decline in 'male earnings' is problem for the economy

President Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve board, Stephen Moore, said on Tuesday that one of the biggest problems facing the U.S. economy is the drop in male earnings.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings, for black males and white males as well,” Moore told CNBC on Tuesday. “They’ve been declining. That is, I think, a big problem.”

“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course. People are talking about women’s earnings. They’ve risen,” he added.

Today, on average, a woman working full time earns about 80.7 cents for every dollar a man working full time earns, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, women’s real or inflation adjusted earnings have increased more than men’s since 2010.

The conservative economic analyst has faced questions from both sides of the political aisle over his past writings on women, including several opinion pieces published on the website of the conservative National Review magazine in 2001, 2002 and 2003 in which he wrote that women should be banned from refereeing, announcing or bartending at men’s college basketball games. And in 2014, in a column he penned for National Review, Moore criticized a gender pay equality proposal from a Democratic senator, calling it a “laughably bad idea.”

“The crisis in America today isn’t about women’s wages; it’s about men’s wages,” he wrote. “Men are still the chief breadwinners in most families, and their wages are not moving much at all.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on Monday that the White House is currently reviewing Moore’s writings. During an interview on ABC television, Moore apologized for some of the comments, but said he did not remember everything he’d written over the course of his career.

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“Frankly, I didn’t even remember writing some of these they were so long ago,” he said.