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.” ||||| Americans’ incomes jumped in 2015 by the most since the last recession and the poverty rate fell, signs of U.S. economic health that could potentially boost Democratic candidates this year. 
 
 Fresh yearly data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed median, inflation-adjusted household income rose 5.2 percent to $56,516 in 2015, the highest level since $57,423 in 2007, when the recession began. Gains were spread across the income spectrum and by race, while women’s earnings inched closer to men’s. 
 
 The data suggest incomes are getting a boost from job gains to help break out of the stagnancy that’s been a blemish on the seven-year U.S. economic recovery. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who gave Hillary Clinton a strong challenge for the Democratic nomination, have tried to appeal to voters in part by capitalizing on weak wage gains. 
 
 “A combination of employment growth as well as some modest acceleration in wages seem to be showing through,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Plc in New York. “If you’re looking at a comparison from what I call the bubble years, we’re just getting back to those levels.” 
 
 The poverty rate was at 13.5 percent, representing 43.1 million Americans -- a drop of 1.2 percentage points from 2014, the agency said. 
 
 More Employed 
 
 The rise in median income was due mainly to an increase in employment and in full-time, year-round workers, with 1.4 million men and 1 million women added, Trudi Renwick, an assistant Census division chief, said on a conference call. 
 
 Even with a 7.3 percent gain from its post-recession low of $52,666 in 2012, median income was still 2.4 percent below its inflation-adjusted peak of $57,909 in 1999. 
 
 President Barack Obama celebrated the improvements in income and poverty at a campaign rally in Philadelphia for Clinton. He also noted that the share of the population without health insurance fell to an all-time low, a consequence of the coverage expansions under the Affordable Care Act that Obama signed into law. 
 
 "Republicans don’t like to hear good news right now," Obama said. "But it’s important just to understand this is a big deal. More Americans are working, more have health insurance, incomes are rising, poverty is falling. And gas is $2 a gallon! Thanks, Obama." 
 
 Federal Reserve 
 
 More recent data from the Labor Department showed hiring and wage gains cooling in August. The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates unchanged since a quarter-point increase in December, and most economists and investors expect the central bank to stand pat again this month as inflation remains below policy makers’ 2 percent goal. 
 
 “This is something that fits into their broader narrative that things have gotten better, but by no means suggests that things are getting overheated,” said Barclays’s Gapen, who previously worked at the Fed. “It justifies gradually higher interest rates over time, but not in a way that suggests we’re behind the curve.” 
 
 Clinton, now the Democratic nominee, is making a bid to extend her party’s tenure in the White House after eight years under President Barack Obama. Clinton has supported raising the minimum wage and has focused on raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to help pay for proposals such as infrastructure projects and public-college tuition. 
 
 Trump Plan 
 
 Trump has countered with a plan to reduce taxes, reduce regulatory burdens on businesses and revamp trade deals that he says are leaving too many Americans worse off. He also wants to boost spending on infrastructure and the military. 
 
 Democrats were gleeful over the Census report. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said the figures showed “remarkable progress” among American families as employment and wage growth strengthened. New York Senator Charles Schumer called it “excellent news.” 
 
 The report also showed that the number of people without health insurance coverage for the whole year was 29 million, or 9.1 percent, down 1.3 percentage points from 2014, according to the bureau. 
 
 (An earlier version of this story corrected the number of women workers and the spelling of a Census official’s name.)
– 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.