No Tax on Overtime?

On lonely night watches onboard the USNS Supply as a Third Engineer, I often contemplated that the tax rate on overtime pay should not be higher than a worker's regular wages. After all, overtime is usually worked during nights and weekends for the convenience of the employer (rather than the employee), and workplace accidents are most likely to happen after working over 40 hours in a week. No tax on overtime? A better deal than I could ever imagine. This would have been a pipe dream, except one state has actually tried it. Alabama made this a reality, at least temporarily, in an effort to alleviate labor shortages. The offer of untaxed overtime wages sounds too good to be true, and the plan will probably be axed by the bean counters who work for Congress. Yet the affordable suburbs of the Northeast, home to cops and firefighters and transportation workers, ate this up wholeheartedly. These are places like Ocean County, NJ (outside of New York City) and Stafford County, VA (outside of Washington, DC), where half of a blue collar civil servant's paycheck can come from overtime pay. If implemented, this could mean a significant rollback in income tax for an unsung group. As a counterpoint, the Hampton Roads region of Virginia has a large number of overtime-eligible workers (particularly among civilian employees in the shipyards and aviation hangars). However, there was no big move towards Trump. After working locally for several years, I realized that the South prefers to spend time with friends and family, rather than maximizing a paycheck.