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Great Trump Idea Announced in Vegas, Baby!

fizkes (Shutterstock) Photo ID: 1492617746
When I was in college, I rented a room from a family with two little girls. At the time, the mother wasn’t working but told me about an experience she had previously as a waitress. As a Christian, she believed she was obligated to report all of her tips (following Matthew 22:15 – 22). The other waitresses, who were trying to avoid paying their taxes on the tips were quite angry with her and treated her quite poorly. She was in an untenable situation, and really the Federal government should take the lion’s share of the blame.
That’s why I was quite pleased to hear that at a rally in Las Vegas today, Candidate Donald Trump announced that one of his first initiatives in his second term as President would be to do away with the tax on tips for hotel and restaurant workers.
Ever since the pandemic, the service industry has been facing many different challenges. This policy would be a godsend.
There are so many things about Trump that I abhor. But I like this policy. (I also like that other policy he has, as opposed to Biden, of not destroying America.)
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That is Biden-levels of pandering there. I hate it. Either all income is taxed or none is. We should have a flat tax with a low rate.
Sounds like a good idea.
What a ridiculously stupid pandering idea.
Tips are wages. Tax it. And audit them to make sure they’re paying FICA on it too.
Wow. I guess we really will need those 87,000 arms-carrying IRS agents.
Exactly.
It’s chickenfeed. To the people on the bottom end, for whom tips represent a major revenue stream, this will make a real difference.
To those of you who have never worked at a restaurant, cheating is rife anyway.
Should be the first baby step in the process of getting rid of the IRS and finding other sources of revenues to support a small federal government.
Cheating is much less common in the post-cash era. Doesn’t matter we should push correct principles and this is a horrible idea. It favors special interest over general interest. I causes economic distortions by favoring certain types income over others. It encourages politicians to “buy votes” with other tax payer money. This is an easy call, when you follow principles.
Tips are income.
I’d love to not pay taxes on a portion of my income because “it will make a real difference”.
That’s why we should do more auditing.
That flat rate hurts hardest at the bottom. It doesn’t matter how low you make the percentage.
I’m going to get myself a job as a garbageman, except that instead of calling myself a sanitation engineer I’m going to be a sanitation waiter so I won’t have to pay tax on my income.
Then I’ll get a job as an IT consultant, er, IT waiter.
How much is all that extra government going to cost? Stack that against the pittance you can expect to take in. Still sound like a good deal?
What are you talking about? Auditing is cheap and easy. Software does all work. This is not 1924.
Since when does the president have the authority to declare that some types of income are untaxable? Congress is supposed to make tax law. I think it is panic-mongering when Democrats say that Trump will be a dictator, but it doesn’t help the cause when Trump shoots off his mouth with fantasies about acting like a dictator.
Even if this were proposed in Congress, I would oppose it. It’s not fair. If someone has a job where they get a couple of tips a year and they don’t declare it, who cares? But there are jobs where people make more in tips than in their actual paycheck.
Every flat tax proposal I have heard of has a pretty good personal exemption. You don’t pay income tax starting on your first dollar of income. The first $(fill in the blank) is tax exempt and you only pay tax after that point.
Yeah, but they need all those new IRS Agents to carry those guns.
“hurts” is a opinion. It affects all payers equally and distorts the economy the least. If you are feeling like redistributing money, then give back an amount, say $2000. Student loans are the hardest to pay off for those that went to expensive Ivy League schools and got garbage gender studies degrees. Should we pay off the loans for those schmucks? Besides, you know all the real “tip” money is going to go to hookers. What kind of principle says I should favor “tax breaks for hookers”??
Government doesn’t do cheap and easy. Government never does cheap and easy.
Those personal exemptions may help but they don’t keep the tax from being regressive. And they add complexity to tax enforcement.
How about personal income tax is not a sound way to fund a limited federal government? There’s no way to get it right.
There is no way to get it right with any tax.
From the link:
Funny what people read into that very straightforward statement. Very telling.
Regardless, pure campaign genius. Modern American political rules of engagement require Team FJB to turn their opposition to this simple pandering nothing burger up to 11 from now until Election Day. Should be fun at the debates if they really happen. (Nothing requires those inside our perimeter to whine about any of this now, but you know many will.)
How did that work out for the Canadian truckers? A post-cash era allows institutions at the behest of government to cut you off from your cash. It’s still your cash, even if the government thinks it is theirs.
Define a portion? 10%? 20% ? 50%? I remember from my pizza delivery days tips were a huge part of my income. This was back in the glory days when people would pay in cash. Had a few stoners who would give me a $20 for a ten dollar pizza. I’d leave with an extra $10 and a contact high from opening the door and being white buffaloed from all the stink weed they’d been smoking.
Nevada is a cash heavy state. I know casino dealers are almost exclusively tipped in cash. I would assume restaurant workers are tipped in cash more than in other states. I doubt much of that is reported. It seems like I hardly use a credit card when I’m in the Silver State.
There are a lot of domestic-type jobs where the present tax system does not work well. Some employers don’t want to be bothered with IRS withholding and therefore pay their gardeners, maids, nannies, etc. under the table. If the employee wants to be scrupulously honest under IRS rules, they would have to badger their employer to provide withholding and a W-2. According to a reasonable interpretation of IRS rules, most of them can’t be considered to be independent contractors, and if they were, they would need once again to get a 1099 from significant sources of income. So you can take your money under the table or get your employer in hot water for failure to withhold or to provide proper documentation. That is a good way to get fired.
The IRS rules are good at making criminals out of the lower-earning groups, especially those who work for smaller employers.
The hotel industry is notorious for hiring illegals through “contractors” to the point that it could be called could be called indentured servitude, if not slavery. I figure the IRS must be looking the other way.
This is why I think sales taxes are fairer than income taxes. If you have a lot of money, you will buy a lot of nice things and pay a lot of taxes. If you don’t have money, you don’t buy so much and don’t pay as much in taxes. Oversimplification perhaps, but I think it is the place to start.
Except for the wealthy who buy things from other countries avoiding many taxes, including yachts from other countries which might also be moored in other countries without taxes on THAT…
A great way to destroy citizen tolerance of the income tax. I’ve been in them there hills where revenuers fear to tread.
Yes, there are always work-arounds and complications. no system will be perfect, but I think that a system based upon sales taxes will generally be fairer and simpler over all.
The problem with a flat tax is that tax rates are easy. They have nothing to do with a complicated tax code. It’s defining income that is hard.
For example, in this case Trump (and a few on this thread) think that tips should not count as income. I’d like someone to make a compelling case for why this should be so other than “restaurant workers need money”.
Casino dealers are not (individually) tipped in cash. All tips go in a community jar and get split (and reported) across all workers. Any dealer who took cash and kept it would be fired on the spot.
I don’t know how true the following statement from Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign is, but it is very unfair if applied as stated:
“That’s why it’s an outrage that waiters, waitresses and other service-sector employees have to pay taxes on the tips they earn. And to add insult to injury, the IRS makes an estimate of how much service-sector workers will make in tips and taxes them on it even if the taxpayer did not actually earn as much as the IRS estimate!“