Hey, America—Where’s Your $4000 Raise?

GOP leaders like Donald Trump and Paul Ryan promised you a substantial raise in exchange for huge corporate tax cuts. Where’s your money?

Economists don’t want you to know this, but economics is just as susceptible to Occam’s Razor as every other line of thought. In economic matters, as in just about everything else, the simplest solution is almost always the best one.

Take your wages, for example. It’s a known fact that wages in America have stayed flat for decades, and economists have come up with any number of complex reasons why this might be: maybe inflation is the cause, they wonder; or perhaps the supply/demand ratio has gotten twisted for some reason.

But if you follow the money, the reason for stagnant American wages is as clear as day: trillions of dollars that used to go to worker pay is now hoarded in the coffers of the top one percent and in corporate profits. Where’s the money? It’s up there. Simple.

The connection between corporate profits and your wages is so clear that even Donald Trump and Paul Ryan have acknowledged it. When they were looking to slash taxes for corporations and the wealthy last year, both Trump and Ryan promised the average American taxpayer something big in return for their support: if we pass this tax cut, they swore, Americans would see an annual raise of about $4000.

Over at USA Today, my boss, Nick Hanauer, asks an important question: it’s almost tax day; where’s your $4000? Even if you were one of the lucky few who earned a paltry one-time bonus from corporations after the tax cuts, you still likely aren’t earning anything close to the four thousand dollars more annually that they promised.

In the end, Hanauer writes, that supposed $4000 raise was a lie intended to shut you up so they could hand still more of your wages off to the top one percent and corporate interests:

Here’s the reality: If Trump wanted to give you a raise, he wouldn’t rely on trickle-down lies to do it. A mere $2 increase in the minimum wage would give millions of hardworking Americans a $4,000 raise. A modest updating of our overtime regulations would give a $4,000 raise to tens of millions more.

And of course, if Trump really wanted to put $4,000 in Americans’ pockets, he could have instead given those trillions of dollars in tax cuts directly to people like you, instead of giving them to your boss.

Go read the whole piece to see how Hanauer distills the whole complicated situation down into simple math. This isn’t about complicated tax codes or confusing economic policy—it’s just about honesty.