Via the Economic Policy Intstitute: The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.1 But, crucially, the rule doesn’t actually require that employers distribute “pooled” tips to workers. Under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as tipped […]

This chart caught my fancy after reading the interview with Rep. Tom Cole from the previous post. There is still the tendency to see the stock market (or GDP) as a proxy for the economy. And it is a time honored tradition for politicians to claim credit for economic gain in convoluted story telling: (I […]

An interview on CNBC with Rep.Tom Cole offers some insight into the path to voting yes on the tax bill… Alhough mainstream forecasters like the Joint Committee on Taxation and University of Pennsylvania have issued unflattering analyses of GOP proposals, Cole says his tax-committee colleagues tell him other models offer sunnier results in line with […]

The GOP Tax Bill Disses the Working Class Here’s something about the GOP House and the GOP Senate:  they each passed tax bills (supposed to come out in a “conference” agreement sometime today) that diss the United States’ working class taxpayers.  White or black, Christian or Jew or other, citizen by birth or naturalized citizen–workers […]

The text of the GOP tax complication legislation The Republicans, after holding one sham “public hearing” on their conference bill (without any text released) have on late Friday released the text of their (Republicans only) agreed-upon final bill that will be put to a House and Senate vote as early as Tuesday, December 19, even […]

The Republican Party’s Heartlessness–the Casualty Loss Provision of the purported “tax reform” legislation The GOP is cruising towards passage of its class warfare tax legislation that continues the long trend of Republican tax policy to redistribute upwards to the very rich.  The legislation, however, is supported by a small minority of the American public (latest […]

Hope Lives: Pressing Collins and Corker and Flake on Tax Bill The Republicans’ proposed tax legislation–whether the House or Senate version–is despicable.  It will exacerbate the already devastating income and wealth inequality in this country, leave the federal government without adequate funds for real infrastructure and social safety net needs, and place in almost inviolable […]

Real wages stagnate YoY, decline significantly since July So lackluster has wage growth been that even the modest uptick in consumer inflation to 2.2% YoY in November means that non-managerial workers have seen virtually no real growth in their paychecks over the last 12 months. With yesterday’s +0.4% increase in consumer prices, here’s what YoY […]

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddadd blog) The Ugly Picture of US Wage Growth The chart above shows the Y/Y percentage change in the average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory employees.  We can break this data down into two sections.  Due to higher inflation and stronger unions, the pace of growth was far stronger before […]

The Utterly Terrible GOP Tax “Reform” Scam The Republicans in the House and Senate continue on their downhill rush to pass their so-called “tax reform” plan before the holiday break.  It’s a mad rush to nowhere, a corrupt process of “please the oligarch” that will cause a huge deficit increase (on the scale of $1 […]