This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 5th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Trump administration is reportedly moving ahead with plans to change rules governing overtime pay,

raising the question, why does the federal government regulate overtime pay?

In any case, Cato's Ryan Bourne argues the perceived benefits to workers will likely be short term if they arrive at all.

The Trump administration has plans to raise the overtime pay salary threshold up to $36,000.

Now for people who don't work jobs that offer overtime, what does that actually mean?

Well, yeah, this was a report in the Wall Street Journal last week.

Now at the moment, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, anyone below a certain income threshold

is eligible by law if they work more than 40 hours per week to be paid at least

one and a half times their regular wage for any of those hours above 40 hours per week.

So in essence what this change to the regulation would mean is that raising that salary

threshold would mean that more people would become eligible and fall under this banner of this overtime pay.

So I think the estimates have suggested that about 1.3 million extra people would fall under

this regulation if this change were made.

Now this is something that has been discussed in the past.

President Obama's administration wanted to raise this threshold even more significantly, I believe, to over $50,000.

And usually this is sold as a good news story by administrations proposing it.

They say that not only will the employees themselves see a boost to their total compensation, but some people even suggest that as a result of this,

firms might be likely to create more jobs or at least distribute hours more evenly such that more people can benefit

from more hours. Now those two things are directly contradictory but they seem to believe that

mandating this this overtime pay across a broader range of people

will will bring some economic benefits.

...