However, Hanauer notes, with evident dismay, that the Obama administration seems to once again be going wobbly, to say the least. Administration officials “are likely to raise the threshold only partly,” he wrote, “ and the Obama administration has not yet grappled with the broader question of how moves such as this are critical to helping to restore America’s middle class.” And he’s not just guessing. He’s been in contact with those on the inside: It is my sense, based on my conversations with government officials, that the administration is buying the line from corporate lobbyists who are arguing that such rule changes would devastate their bottom lines, forcing them to lay off workers. You know, the old trickle-down gambit—if workers earn more money, it would be bad for business, the economy and workers. The Obama team, in other words, is buying into the same discredited theories that were used to erode the threshold in the first place. Officials will very likely raise the overtime threshold just enough to say they’re doing something, without actually doing much of anything for the middle class or our demand-starved economy at all. This is the sad truth about Obama’s economic policy—it’s still stuck in Ronald Reagan’s first term, when trickle-down was still a wild, untested theory, rather than one that had been thoroughly discredited by 30+ years of evidence, showing that supply-side economics is inferior in producing investment growth, productivity growth, GDP growth, faster job creation, growth in median income or wages while also causing the national debt to increase substantially. Obama doesn’t just say nice things about Ronald Reagan from time to time, he thinks like Ronald Reagan, deep down in his bones, and—like Reagan—no amount of pesky facts are going to change his mind. But groundswells of public pressure got Reagan to change his tune several times—in making Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, for example. So a similar groundswell of pressure on Obama to restore overtime protections to what they were in 1975 sure couldn’t hurt—and it could even help shape the direction of the next presidency, provided that the Democrats win, as now still seems overwhelmingly likely. salon/2014/12/26/lets_all_screw_the_1_percent_the_simple_move_obama_could_make_to_strengthen_the_rest_of_us/
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:51:45 +0000
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