Donald Trump’s campaign promise to make overtime pay tax-free seems to have left Democrats looking like deer caught in the headlights. It looks like a pro-worker measure, even though it is bad from many perspectives.

It actually should not be hard for progressives to think their way out of this one. It just requires going back to the original rationale for the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1937, which set the length of the normal workweek at 40 hours.

While the Act does reward workers by giving them a 50 percent wage premium when they work more than 40 hours a week, another purpose of this premium was to discourage employers from forcing workers to put in long hours. The idea was both to ensure that workers had a reasonable amount of leisure time to enjoy with their families or for

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