The no tax on tips provision of Donald Trump’s budget cannot be the pro-labor gift that the president has made it out to be while the rest of the bill slashes health care and other social programs for lower-income people. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shed some light as to why that’s the case.
What’s getting me is how my overly conservative family is scorning tipped workers as a result of this (“hasn’t Big Daddy T made enough concessions to these people”). And its like “but he hasn’t. Not really.”
I juggled 2-3 part time restaurant jobs back in the 2009 - 2013 timeframe (total time per week was comparable to a full time job). Even as an only moderately successful male waiter, I was able to pull in ~$32,000 my first year and then evened out to ~$35,000 once I found my flow. That was a decade and a half ago in one of the most conservative corners of the US, and I would have still been paying taxes on my tips back then.
How much of that was tips?
Reported, or total? That’s the funny thing, people who live off tips already are giving themselves a bit of a tax break by fudging numbers, so this isn’t as big of a deal as it seems. And maybe I found the catch - to get people who have these jobs to report their full income, and then when it’s exposed they get more than they’ve claimed, come after them. Yeah, that’s a bit conspiratorial…but everything else seems to be aimed at the commons and how they are the problem.
That’s been my tinfoil hat theory about all this too. Tipped workers are usually the lower rungs of the economic ladder. If they can “prove” they actually make a good deal more than they’ve historically claimed, then they can shed those “hungry mouths” from SNAP and other welfare programs.
This whole thing feels like a trap. I can’t say with confidence where the trap is, but it just feels like its there, ya know?
The vast majority. I was in a state that allowed paying under minimum wage if you received tips.
Gonna keep the numbers to myself to help preserve anonymity, but some back of the napkin math says it was probably 70-90% (depending on how good of a day it was) of my “wages” came from tips.