Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Washington’s Taking Care of Business While You’re Working Overtime.

Washington’s working on new corporate tax breaks. At the same time, they’re likely to cut off overtime for millions of American workers.

New overtime rules take effect August 23. But few of us are aware how it will affect our paychecks. If you’re a professional -- say a nurse, school teacher, or chef you’ll lose your overtime status.

That’s because you’ll now be classified as an "executive employee."

Woo-hoo, a promotion!

Bottom line: If you make under $23,000, you’ll get overtime. Make more than $100,000, and you don’t qualify for overtime. For those of us in between – it’s a mess of red tape to see if we can keep OT.

But Washington’s not satisfied with injuring your pocketbook. They’ll add insult for free. Back in January, when the rules were in their final stages, the government began telling bosses across America how to get away without paying you overtime.

And they used your tax dollars to pay for this little education effort.

And while Washington is looking for ways to let your boss pay you less, Congress is looking at tax breaks for corporations. They’ll cost $63.3 billion.

It’s supposed to help with the recovery.

But now it turns out only about 1% of America’s 2.2 million corporations would see any benefit. The nonpartisan staff of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation found that fewer than 25,000 companies would split the motherlode of benefits.

Gotta pat Congress on their collective backs. They’ll be doing that for themselves soon enough. It’s about time for their annual, automatic pay raise.

Corporations get a tax break. Congress gets a raise. You work longer hours for no more pay.

The rich get richer. The working stiffs get stiffed.

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