Obama Wants to Give You a Pay Raise

More than two years into the official economic recovery, Wall Street has reaped enormous profits while middle-class and low-income workers have been left with crumbs. The result: the Tea Party on the right, Occupy Wall Street on the left, and a President whose Gallup Poll approval rating is scraping 43 percent with less than a year before Election Day. To help alleviate this persistent economic and political tension, Barack Obama has fastened onto a simple idea: He wants to give everyone in the country a pay raise.

Last year, Obama demanded a 2 percentage-point cut in payroll taxes (that’s the 6.2 percent the government takes from your paycheck to fund Social Security) in exchange for extending the Bush Administration’s tax breaks for the wealthy. Now he’s asking to renew the payroll tax holiday, set to expire on Dec. 31, for another year—and to cut the tax by an additional 1.1 percent.