By Hunter
– I find Jeb Bush’s consistent wrongness on basic economic and labor issues baffling. Not that he is so often wrong, but that he seems to put so much work into it.
Jeb Bush has created a flap with another statement about American workers. In an appearance in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Tuesday, he said Barack Obama’s proposal to expand overtime pay to millions more managers and white-collar workers would result in “less overtime pay” and “less wages earned.”
The problem, obviously, is that Bush’s statement is hokum. Closing the very frequently abused loophole that allows employers to require employees to work overtime hours with no overtime pay simply by declaring them so-called “exempt” managers will not result in reduced overtime or reduced wages. And experts in the field can’t even parse out where Bush is getting his abuse-of-workers-is-an-economic-win notions, much less Bush’s additional strange claim that the law promoting stronger worker overtime protections “won’t allow” employee bonuses.
Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas labor economist, said: “He’s just 100% wrong,” adding that “there will be more overtime pay and more total earnings” and “there’s a huge amount of evidence employers will use more workers.” […]
Ross Eisenbrey, a vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center research group, said: “Bush should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Eisenbrey said the proposed rules do nothing whatsoever to bar employers from paying bonuses. “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense,” he said. Eisenbrey and Bernstein wrote a seminal article that helped persuade the Obama administration to change overtime rules.
Between this and his previous insistence that what the American economy really needed is for you workers to simply “work longer hours,” Jeb Bush seems to be aggressively obtuse on economic policy issues—as if his entire economic advisory team is made up of Montgomery Burns and Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Again, it’s not particularly surprising that Jeb Bush, of the Trickle-Down Bush school of economics, would believe that laws restricting the corporate exploitation of workers via an IRS loophole would be a dreadful burden on the ability of our magnanimous and benevolent job-creators to job create most effectively. I would not, however, have expected him to take such baldly anti-worker public stances. That suggests he’s still so mired in catering to the donor class that he has pursued exclusively, up until this point in the race, that he’s finding it difficult to switch to the more nuanced, theoretically populist rhetoric of an actual public campaign. Let them eat cake is what you say in the back rooms, complaining about the shiftless 47 percent and their shiftless ways. You’re not supposed to say that stuff when you’re propped up on a public stage.
Source – http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403990/-Jeb-Bush-says-preventing-unpaid-overtime-abuses-will-hurt-workers-What-planet-is-this-guy-from
