President Obama has no business Âexperience.
For most people, that might incline one to modesty. Not this president. To the contrary, he believes he knows how an auto company should be run, what policies health-insurance companies should offer, the wages, say, a part-time worker in a family restaurant should receive and what banks should pay in bonuses.
Now the president has found a new area in which to intervene. Yesterday he directed his Labor Department to make millions of salaried managers eligible for overtime pay. Under existing rules, employers must pay overtime to salaried workers earning less than $455 a week. Though Obama didn’t set a new figure, most expect it to be more than double that amount.
The rhetoric out of Washington will have you believe this is justice for all those evil corporations making record profits while stiffing employees. That may make for a good election-year sound bite. But it’s surely not the tonic for a nation where a record number of Americans have given up on the job market altogether.
Like so many of Obama’s recent actions, this one will not be done through legislation. Instead, it will be engineered simply by changing the regulations. It’s the same logic behind the boost in the minimum wage. Washington decrees and people get richer.
That, at least, is the theory. The reality is that when government makes people more expensive to employ, sooner or later it will mean fewer people are hired or employed.