That $4000 Raise Trump Promised? - IT AIN'T HAPPENING!

(Cartoon image is by Mike Konopacki at huckkonopackicartoons.com.)

When the Trump/GOP tax plan was passed, they tried to label it a "middle class tax cut". That was immediately exposed as a lie, since over 80% of the cuts went to the richest people in the country.

They then told workers to be patient, because employers would take the windfall tax cuts they received to give workers an average raise of about $4000 a year. But that ain't happening! Instead of the majestic raises Trump promised workers would see, the average hourly wage of an American worker has gone DOWN slightly.

That $4000 raise was just another Donald Trump LIE! Here's the real story about wages in part of an article by Ryan Koronowski at Think Progress:

The federal government just admitted that workers are earning lower wages since the passage of the GOP tax cuts.

When President Donald Trump was pushing Congress to pass his tax plan last year, which focused on lowering corporate rates and the income taxes of high earners, he pulled out a handy statistic: according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, the average family would make $4,000 more under the new plan.

Trump repeatedly used this figure to argue for the bill prior to its passage in December 2017, as well as directly after. During a February 2018 speech in Ohio, he claimed “economists estimate that our business tax cut will raise the income of a typical family by an average of $4,000.” Vice President Mike Pence has repeated that talking point, as have others in the White House.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a new release detailing the “real earnings summary” through May 2018.

The true revelation was tucked away at the bottom of the release, in the “Production and nonsupervisory employees” section: “From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted,” it read.

In today’s dollars, that’s a change from making an average of $22.62 per hour last May to making $22.59 per hour this May.

The report continued, “The decrease in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.6-percent increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.5-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.” In other words, people are working a few more hours a week, so they’re taking home more pay, but only marginally.

The entire rationale behind the tax cut was to boost Americans’ wages. But the BLS numbers prove that workers who are not bosses and who produce things are in fact making less for their time than they did last year.