Democrats were gleeful this week when Donald Trump blurted out in Tuesday's debate that “wages [are] too high.” But as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley prepare to debate Saturday night, the Democrats have a wage problem of their own: American incomes have dropped during the Obama presidency. 
 
 It's a vulnerability that Republicans haven't figured out how to exploit, and it's clearly one of the biggest weaknesses in the Obama economic recovery. 
 
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 In 2014, the last year for which Census data are available, median household income was $1,656 lower than it was in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office. A recent survey by the private firm Sentier Research showed household income finally rose this year above its level in June 2009, when the Great Recession ended — but only by 1.3 percent. That's a terrible record for any presidency. But that such stagnation occurred during a Democratic one is potentially a big problem for Democratic candidates, and especially for Clinton, who's running on her role in that administration. 
 
 “I think that there are two phenomena here,” said Stuart Stevens, a senior strategist in Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “Those who normally are the most articulate, passionate voices for those who are doing least well in the economy have been muted over the past seven years” because they don’t want to undercut Obama. That should create an opening for Republicans. 
 
 But “Republicans have never been great at talking about this,” Stevens said. 
 
 The Republican candidates’ wage conundrum isn’t about excoriating the Democrats. They’re all too happy to call out Obama for failing to lift incomes. 
 
 “These last seven years,” Bobby Jindal said at this week’s GOP “undercard” debate, “inequality has gone up. Only the top 10 percent have seen their incomes go up.” Rick Santorum said not once, not twice, but three times that the middle class was “hollowing out.” In the primetime debate that followed, Jeb Bush said “the disposable income of the great middle is down 2,300 bucks … Jobs are being created, but they’re lower-income jobs than the jobs that were lost.” 
 
 But while the GOP candidates are eager to state the wages problem, they struggle to explain how they would fix it. 
 
 “It’s a bit awkward,” says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, “if Republicans are talking about the need for wage growth and opposed to a minimum wage increase.” 
 
 Only one of the Republican presidential candidates has endorsed a specific minimum-wage hike: Rick Santorum, who would raise the hourly minimum to $8.75, up from the current $7.25, over a period of three years. The Democratic field, meanwhile, proposes raising the minimum to $12 (Clinton) or $15 (Sanders, O’Malley). 
 
 Ben Carson expressed in the September CNN debate tentative support for an unspecified increase. He also said he favored a lower “starter” minimum wage for young people. And Carson said the wage minimum should rise automatically with inflation “so that we never have to have this conversation again.” 
 
 Romney also favored indexing the minimum wage, figuring, like Carson, that it would remove the topic permanently from the partisan arena. (Because the minimum wage is popular, politicizing it mostly hurts Republicans.) “It was a position [Romney] had as governor and a position he kept,” Stevens said, “and he ended up with a higher percentage of the GOP vote than Bush in 2000.” (Actually, Romney muddied his support in 2012 by proposing the minimum be indexed not only to inflation but also to “the jobs level throughout the country, unemployment rate [and] competitive rates in other states, or, in this case, other nations.”) 
 
 But earlier this week Carson appeared to back away from his pro-minimum wage stance. “I would not raise it,” Carson said at Tuesday’s debate, “because I'm interested in making sure that people are able to enter the job market and take advantage of opportunities.” 
 
 The Carson campaign didn’t answer POLITICO’s request for clarification, but spokesman Doug Watts told the Daily Beast that Carson’s position was unchanged. “His answer focused on the lower tier, which he does not believe needs raising, as it is an entry-level wage. He believes in a second, higher tier that, once determined, is indexed,” Watts told the Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick in a post-debate email. 
 
 The other Republican candidates all oppose raising the minimum wage, and two of them — Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush — have indicated a preference for leaving the matter to the states. Then there's Trump, who since Tuesday has clarified that when he said wages were too high he was referring to the minimum wage, not to wages in general. (He did not propose lowering it.) 
 
 Perhaps no candidate has underscored the Republicans’ wage dilemma more than Marco Rubio. “You can’t live on $10 an hour,” Rubio said in October. “You can’t live on $11 an hour.” That would indicate, logically, that still less can one live on $7.25 an hour. But Rubio opposes raising the federal minimum. 
 
 To Republicans, “raising the minimum wage is a Band Aid solution,” explains Matthew Dickinson, a political scientist at Middlebury College. Lara Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University, says Republicans aren’t necessarily wrong about that. “The Democratic solution is dealing with the minimum wage. But the vast majority of people in the country are not making the minimum wage.” 
 
 Instead, the Republican candidates favor stimulating the economy mainly through tax cuts and deregulation. But such policies yielded only modest growth in median household income under President Ronald Reagan, and a decline under President George W. Bush. Awareness has grown that sluggish wage growth is a long-term problem that's prevailed for four decades (excepting a period of brisk wage growth during the tech boom of the late 1990s). 
 
 “Wages for the bottom 90 percent of the economy have been stagnant for 40 years,” Mike Huckabee said at Tuesday’s debate. Huckabee blamed the Federal Reserve. He favors a return to the gold standard, along with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. But this position, long favored by many in the party’s more conservative wing, has never stirred much excitement among voters. 
 
 The most dramatic initiative that Obama has undertaken to intervene in the wage economy has earned almost no mention from the Republican field. That’s the Labor Department’s proposed rule to more than double (to $50,440) the threshold under which virtually all salaried employees would qualify for time-and-a-half pay if they worked more than 40 hours in a given week. 
 
 The overtime rule, which is expected to increase by five million the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, was welcomed warmly by Clinton and especially by Sanders and O’Malley. Congressional Republicans have denounced it as burdensome, echoing strong opposition by the business lobby. But the GOP’s presidential candidates have been largely silent on the topic. 
 
 “It will probably become an increasing topic of debate,” said Dickinson, “particularly as the Labor department prepares for a final rule.” But with a final rule now not expected until late in 2016, “this one’s not close enough to fruition to become a target of attack.” ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — Ben Carson botched the economic effect of minimum wage increases. Jeb Bush again pitched a dubious target for economic growth. Marco Rubio, in a tale about plumbers and philosophers, undersold the value of a college education. 
 
 Donald Trump speaks as Ben Carson listens during Republican presidential debate at Milwaukee Theatre, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash) (Associated Press) 
 
 Jeb Bush speaks as John Kasich, left, and Marco Rubio listen during Republican presidential debate at Milwaukee Theatre, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash) (Associated Press) 
 
 And Ted Cruz showed just how hard it can be to name government agencies when, just like Rick Perry four years ago in a famously misbegotten moment in a GOP debate, he messed up the list of departments he would close as president. 
 
 The fourth debate of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign was thick on economic policy — and with that came a variety of flubs and funny numbers. 
 
 Some of the claims Tuesday night and how they compare with the facts: 
 
 CARSON: "Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases." 
 
 THE FACTS: Actually, that usually doesn't happen. When the minimum wage was increased in 1996 and 1997, the unemployment rate fell afterward. In June 2007, when the first of three annual minimum wage increases was implemented, the unemployment rate was unchanged until the Great Recession began six months later. 
 
 Economic research has found that when states raise their minimum wages higher than neighboring states, they don't typically fare any worse than their neighbors. 
 
 It's not known, though, what would happen to jobs if the minimum wage were doubled to $15— as many fast-food workers who demonstrated before the debate were demanding. 
 
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 RUBIO: "Welders make more money than philosophers." 
 
 Not so, on average. 
 
 Rubio is arguing that the U.S. has failed to invest in vocational training — a point also stressed by President Barack Obama's now-defunct jobs council. But Rubio is wrong to suggest that studying philosophy is a waste of money and time. 
 
 PayScale, a firm that analyzes compensation, put the median mid-career income for philosophy majors at $81,200 in 2008, with welders making $26,002 to $63,698. 
 
 And Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce said in a 2014 analysis that median incomes were $68,000 for people with an advanced degree in philosophy or religious studies. 
 
 So knowing Plato and getting a college degree still pays off. 
 
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 CRUZ, holding out his hand and unfolding one finger at a time to punctuate his point: "Five major agencies that I would eliminate: the IRS (his thumb), the Department of Commerce (index finger), the Department of Energy (middle finger), uh, the Department of Commerce (ring finger), and HUD (pinkie)." 
 
 THE FACTS: He flubbed his own list, naming the Commerce Department twice and leaving out one of the agencies he proposes to close, according to his website: the Education Department. 
 
 Perry, then Texas governor, had almost precisely the same problem at a GOP primary debate in November 2011, coming up with the names of only two of the three departments he wanted to close, Commerce and Education. "Oops," he said after failing to name the third agency, Energy, a slip that haunted him for the rest of his campaign. 
 
 But Cruz moved on without anyone calling him on the gaffe. 
 
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 BUSH: "We could get to 4 percent growth." 
 
 THE FACTS: That's a highly improbable target because of forces in the economy that are beyond the control of any president. 
 
 Those forces have been decades in the making: an exodus from the workforce of the huge generation of baby boomers, rising automation and low-wage competition overseas. Those factors and more have limited income growth, which in turn cuts into the consumer spending that drives most economic growth. 
 
 Bush frequently holds out hope of 4 percent growth, but even conservative economists who like his fiscal and tax plans consider it a false hope. According to current forecasts, growth is expected to average roughly half that rate. 
 
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 DONALD TRUMP: The Pacific trade agreement signed by President Obama with 11 other nations "was designed for China to come in through the back door and take advantage of everyone. ... China takes advantage (of the U.S.) through currency manipulation." 
 
 THE FACTS: The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, signed last month, does not include China and is intended to give the United States more influence in Asia as a counterweight to China's rising economic power. Obama argues that China could join later, but without having any influence on the agreement's terms. 
 
 Regarding currency manipulation, Trump is recycling an outdated claim. He has argued that China keeps its currency undervalued by 15 percent to 40 percent, which would make its exports cheaper and more attractive overseas. Yet the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which had criticized China for keeping its currency artificially low, concluded in 2012 that China's currency by then was fully valued. The International Monetary Fund has reached the same conclusion. 
 
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 CARLY FIORINA: "Obamacare isn't really helping anybody." 
 
 THE FACTS: President Barack Obama's health care law may or may not be good for the country on balance. But it's clearly helping many people. 
 
 In the two years it's been in effect, the share of Americans without health insurance has declined to 9 percent, a historic low. People with pre-existing health conditions can no longer be turned away by insurers, and everyone is required to have coverage or face fines. 
 
 While the coverage mandate in Obama's law remains highly unpopular, state-run high-risk health insurance pools like the one Fiorina proposes to replace the law have been tried before and failed to solve the problem. 
 
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 CRUZ: Since 2008, the economy has grown on average only 1.2 percent a year, showing "the Obama economy is a disaster." 
 
 THE FACTS: That average is correct as far as it goes, but it masks the fact that Obama inherited a raging recession in his first year, when the economy shrank by 2.5 percent. In the five years since, the economy expanded an average of 2 percent, more than Cruz's figure but still a relatively weak recovery in historical terms. 
 
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 TRUMP: "I will tell you, I don't have to give you a website because I'm self-funding my campaign. I'm putting up my own money." 
 
 THE FACTS: This assertion might have been true months ago but no longer is. 
 
 Trump's latest campaign finance report, filed Oct. 15 with the Federal Election Commission, shows that of $3.9 million his campaign raised in the latest fundraising quarter just $100,000 came from Trump, and the rest from donors. It was a big change from last spring, when he loaned his campaign nearly all of the $1.9 million it received. 
 
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 BUSH: "We need to raise the (banks') capital requirements. ... Dodd-Frank has actually done the opposite, totally the opposite. ... Bigger banks have more and more control over the financial assets of this country." 
 
 THE FACTS: Actually, the Dodd-Frank legislation, passed in 2010 in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, has pushed banks to raise more capital — in other words, to obtain more of their funding from investment, rather than debt. 
 
 In fact, Dodd-Frank was criticized earlier this year by the right-leaning American Action Forum for effectively forcing banks to raise more capital. 
 
 Bush and other Republican candidates suggested that Dodd-Frank sparked bank consolidations, but the mergers actually started in 2008 under George W. Bush. During that year alone, as the market melted down, Wells Fargo took over Wachovia, JP Morgan Chase bought Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, and Bank of America acquired both Countrywide Mortgage and Merrill Lynch. 
 
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 CARSON: Discussing the presence of Russian troops in Syria, added that "the Chinese are there" as well. 
 
 THE FACTS: China has no publicly known deployment of military forces in Syria. In recent days, some news reports have suggested that China would send a warship to Syria, but China's foreign ministry has denied that. 
 
 China has used its status as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to block the U.N. from taking action on Syria, citing a commonly heard argument against violating Syrian sovereignty. 
 
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 Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Paul Wiseman and Ken Dilanian contributed to this report.
– Politico has an interesting article on what it's calling "the Democrats' wage problem," a major takeaway of which is that the average American income has actually gone down during Obama's years as president. The median household income in 2014 was more than $1,600 lower than it was in January 2009, according to Census data. And while a recent survey says median household income is finally above its 2009 level this year, it's barely 1% above it. Politico calls this "one of the biggest weaknesses in the Obama economic recovery" and says it could be a big problem for Hillary Clinton since she was part of the administration. However Politico reports none of that is to say Republicans know how to fix stagnant wages or have even shown themselves able to capably address the issue. “It’s a bit awkward if Republicans are talking about the need for wage growth and opposed to a minimum wage increase," one political scientist tells Politico. Only one GOP presidential candidate—Rick Santorum—has a proposal to raise the national minimum wage, and it's more modest than similar proposals from any of the Democratic candidates. The majority of the other Republican candidates favor fixing stagnant wages through tax cuts and deregulation, policies that only exacerbated the problem under George W. Bush. Read the full story here.