 (Alex Brandon/AP) By Matt O'Brien It only took seven years, but middle-class incomes are finally rising again, and nothing President-elect Donald Trump does will change that. The question, though, is whether they'll go up quite as much as they would have if we weren't, as Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) put it, at "the dawn of a new unified Republican government." And the answer is maybe not. Take President Obama's new overtime rule, which was just about to go into effect before a federal judge put an injunction on it. It would require companies to automatically pay salaried employees making $47,476 or less annually time-and-a-half overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week. That'd be more than double the $23,660 threshold that we currently have, and would give a raise to as many as 4 million workers. Republicans, though, want to repeal it, because, as Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) put it, "a ton of private-sector businesses" will "either have to eat that cost or pass that cost on to their customers." Now, on the one hand, that's true. But on the other, that doesn't seem like it should be much of a concern when profits are still near all-time highs. Indeed, corporate profits have averaged 8.6 percent of gross domestic product since 2008, compared to just 6.0 percent before then. It's just another example that, whether it's wages or taxes or entitlements, non-Trump Republicans want policies that mostly help those who don't need much help. Ryan's tax plan, of course, being another. It would give 99.6 percent of its total tax cuts to the top 1 percent of households. Populism this is not. |
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