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      Trump’s Proposal to End Taxes on Overtime Pay Could Cost Billions

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is calling for exempting overtime pay from taxes, the latest in a string of vague tax proposals that have befuddled tax experts, worried fiscal hawks and seemingly charmed voters.Mr. Trump floated the idea this past week during a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., telling the crowd that it would supercharge incentives to work more and put money back in the pockets of many Americans.“It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we’re doing because this is a good one,” he said.The pitch is part of what has become Mr. Trump’s playbook during the presidential race: tossing out potentially huge tax cuts, defined in just a few words, to try and win over middle- and working-class voters. He has also vowed to exempt tips from taxes and end taxes on Social Security benefits, two ideas that have proven popular. At the same time, he has said he would further cut the corporate tax rate.As with his promise to end taxes on tips, though, Mr. Trump left many key details about the overtime plan unaddressed, making it hard to estimate its costs. Among the open questions is whether overtime pay would be exempt from just the income tax or if the exception would also apply to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.There is also the issue of how many Americans could benefit from Mr. Trump’s idea. More than 34 million Americans worked over 40 hours a week in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but only a subset of that group are owed time-and-a-half pay for overtime under federal law. The rules are complex, but in general Americans earning a salary of more than $43,888 a year may not be owed overtime, depending on their job. Americans paid by the hour, currently about 55 percent of the work force, are broadly eligible for overtime pay.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Pennsylvania, Wary Voters Wonder if Harris Can Deliver

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      Economic issues including soaring rents, student loan debt, supply chain issues and a stagnant minimum wage are on their minds.In a packed college gym in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Friday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris closed out a long, successful week by elaborating on her vision for “an opportunity economy,” a centerpiece of her presidential campaign: Three million new homes. A pledge to take on “corporate price gouging.” Tax cuts for more than 100 million Americans.About a mile away, Judith Johnson was watching Ms. Harris’s rally on television in her apartment. A registered Republican, Ms. Johnson, 54, thought Ms. Harris had been “wonderful” in the debate on Tuesday; she was eager to learn more, especially about the economy.But Ms. Johnson’s vote, at least for now, remains with former President Donald J. Trump. “He’s a businessman,” she said. “And I think he sees what’s going on.”Ms. Johnson exemplifies the challenge facing Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania and in other critical battleground states. People like her say they are open to switching their vote. But they want to know: An opportunity economy — how? And for whom?Wilkes-Barre, a former industrial city, is seat of Luzerne County, which Mr. Trump has won handily, twice. While Democrats tend to do best in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, they see narrowing the gap in places like Wilkes-Barre as key to winning the state. In 2020 President Biden, who was born in nearby Scranton, ate into Mr. Trump’s margin there by several points, part of a wave of support that lifted him to victory in the state.Polls suggest Ms. Harris may struggle to replicate that success. Despite her modest upbringing and her emphasis, on the campaign trail, on the needs of “middle-class, working people,” as she put it on Friday, she is still laboring to persuade many voters that she understands them, or that she can deliver on her promises.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Vile Lie About Haitians Is the Latest in a Long and Grim Tradition

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      When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elizabeth Warren: Don’t Be Fooled. Donald Trump Has a Plan.

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      During the presidential debate on Tuesday, Donald Trump was pressed on the details of his plan to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “better.” The question should’ve been a softball. After all, Mr. Trump has been promising the American people a plan for nine years, so he’s had time to prepare. His answer? After ducking and weaving, he came up with: “I have concepts of a plan.” Uh, that’s not a plan.Plans translate values into action. They test the quality of the ideas and the seriousness of the people advancing them. Plans reveal for whom candidates will fight and how effective they are likely to be. And in a presidential race, if either party’s nominee is asked about his or her plans for something as fundamental as health care, voters should get a straight answer.The problem is not that Mr. Trump can’t think up a way to put his values into action. The problem is that when he and other Republican leaders produce plans with actual details, they horrify the American people.Mr. Trump’s health care values have been on full display for years. In 2017, Republicans controlled Congress, and their first major legislative undertaking was a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time they drafted something, independent experts would point out that their plan would toss tens of millions of people off their health insurance, jack up premium costs and slash benefits for those with ongoing health problems.After months of wrangling, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers voted a bill through the House to repeal the A.C.A. That night, Mr. Trump hosted a party at the White House to celebrate their big step toward taking away health care from millions of people.A.C.A. repeal then moved to the Senate. Republicans had the majority, so if they all stuck with Mr. Trump, the A.C.A. would die. As senators gathered to vote, nearly all of the Democrats — including Kamala Harris, then a senator from California — remained standing, too anxious even to sit down. We murmured stories about who would be affected by this vote: the uncle who had cancer and would lose coverage, the kid diagnosed with a heart anomaly whose parents wouldn’t be able to find new insurance, the college students who would just go without coverage and hope they didn’t fall on ice or get in a car accident. We felt the weight of people’s lives on the line.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking

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      Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate — an inconclusive struggle between a credentialed elite that keeps failing at basic tasks of governing and a populist rebellion that’s too chaotic and paranoid to be trusted with authority instead.The 2024 campaign in its waning days is a grim illustration of this deadlock. We just watched Kamala Harris, the avatar of the liberal establishment, smoothly out-debate Trump by goading him into expressing populism at its worst — grievance-obsessed, demagogic, nakedly unfit.But her smoothness was itself an evasion of the actual record of the administration in which she serves. Harris offered herself as the turn-the-page candidate while sidestepping almost every question about what the supposed adults in the room have wrought across the last four years.A historic surge in migration that happened without any kind of legislation or debate. A historic surge in inflation that was caused by the pandemic, but almost certainly goosed by Biden administration deficits. A mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. A stalemated proxy war in Eastern Europe with a looming threat of escalation. An elite lurch into woke radicalism that had real-world as well as ivory-tower consequences, in the form of bad progressive policymaking on crime and drugs and schools.All of this and more the Harris campaign hopes that voters forgive or just forget, while it claims the mantle of change and insists that “we’re not going back.”Undecided voters in a polarized America generate a lot of exasperated criticism from both sides of the partisan divide. And no doubt it will exasperate many readers when I suggest that the choices presented in this election make indecision entirely understandable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Starmer, Meeting Biden, Hints at Ukraine Weapons Decision Soon

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      As the president deliberated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the question of whether to let Ukraine use long-range weapons in Russia was a rare point of contention between allied nations.President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict.But the decision now facing Mr. Biden after Friday’s closed-door meeting at the White House — whether to sign off on the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France — could be far more consequential than previous concessions by the president that delivered largely defensive weapons to Ukraine during the past two and a half years.In remarks at the start of his meeting with Mr. Starmer, the president underscored his support for helping Ukraine defend itself but did not say whether he was willing to do more to allow for long-range strikes deep into Russia.“We’re going to discuss that now,” the president told reporters.For his part, the prime minister noted that “the next few weeks and months could be crucial — very, very important that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom.”European officials said earlier in the week that Mr. Biden appeared ready to approve the use of British and French long-range missiles, a move that Mr. Starmer and officials in France have said they want to provide a united front in the conflict with Russia. But Mr. Biden has hesitated to allow Ukraine to use arms provided by the United States in the same way over fears that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would see it as a major escalation.On Thursday, Mr. Putin responded to reports that America and its allies were considering such a move by declaring that it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” according to a report by the Kremlin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      D.E.I. in College, Attacked and Defended

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      More from our inbox:Why Trump Doesn’t Want Another DebateTrump’s Mental FitnessCancel the Sentinel Missile ProgramA Walker in Manhattan Eli DurstTo the Editor:Re “D.E.I. Is Not Working in Colleges. We Need a New Approach,” by Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 5):Mr. Brest and Dr. Levine underscore the importance of inclusion for all students’ academic success. I agree: For students to succeed, they must have access to a rigorous learning environment in which they also feel they matter.But I disagree with the professors on the history and roles of diversity offices that are responsible for fostering such a sense of belonging. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education are mission-driven, evidence-backed, research-informed and tailored to meet the particular needs of each campus.These practices seek to bring people together and collaboratively eliminate barriers to success, and they have evolved with legislative and judicial efforts to address decades of discrimination against protected categories under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Given the complexities of differing institutional types, historical legacies and current contexts, the solution includes acknowledging that we live in a pluralist society, that we can value differences as a community of learners, and that doing so is not contrary to academic freedom and critical thinking.There is work ahead to ensure we can continue to meet the needs of our ever-evolving communities. There always will be work ahead; the pursuit of progress is, by definition, unending.Paulette Granberry RussellWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris or Trump? Once Again, Election Results Could Take a While.

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      More Americans are using mail-in ballots, which take longer to count than those cast in person. In several battleground states, a winner may not be apparent on Nov. 5.The hosts of election night parties may want to book a room for more than just one night.For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump appears extremely close.If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots.Election officials across the country are trying to telegraph to voters that waiting long hours or even days for a result is not unexpected in a close election. They are eager to counter conspiracy theorists who may seize on the uncertainty as evidence of fraud or malfeasance.“I keep objecting to the term ‘delays,’” said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania. The ballots, he said, would be counted “as expeditiously as possible, and counting votes takes time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More