Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

My favorite part of this extended and detailed slagging of the Labor Department's change in overtime pay regulations is the following:

[...]it is not the case that 1.3 million low-wage workers who are not getting overtime pay now will. The Administration is engaged in consumer fraud, selling this new regulation on the promise of benefits it knows full well will not materialize. Part of the problem is that the Department’s estimate assumes that every employee among these 1.3 million low-wage workers actually worked overtime during the year, even though the evidence is that they did not, and even though only about one employee in seven generally works overtime. If the Department had made this same assumption with respect to the proposed rule, it would have found that almost 5 million employees would have lost overtime pay, rather than the 644,000 it claimed.[...]

Got that? They figured in the fraction of people who actually work overtime when estimating how many people will lose overtime pay, but not when estimating how many will gain it.

I'm not even surprised by this crap any more.