OPINION: ‘No Tax On Tips’ Is Suddenly Popular With the Tax-And-Spend Democrats

“No tax on tips. All of a sudden, out of the blue,” said President Trump during a press conference yesterday at his property at Bedminster, New Jersey. He was, of course, referring to his November opponent stealing his groundbreaking, populist policy proposal: workers won’t be taxed on the tips they earn.

During his RNC acceptance speech, Trump said the idea came to him while talking to one of his waitresses at his Las Vegas hotel. After learning that tipped employees are subject to taxes on their earnings, he created yet another catchy campaign slogan, this time it was “No tax on tips!”

Speaking candidly during the two hour press conference, Trump imagined Vice President Kamala Harris giving him credit: “She could have at least said, ‘You know, President Trump had some great ideas. But one of the ideas was no tax on tips.’”

The former president continued, “I think it would have been nice and people would have accepted that, but she just came out like it was hers, and she never had it. In fact, just the opposite. The IRS is all set up to really go after people that make tips.”

In fact, the IRS is all set up to go after hospitality workers after Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the “so-called” Inflation Reduction Act which expanded the size and powers of the IRS.

As reported by Fair Tax:

On August 7, 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act that provided $80 billion in additional funding to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which then got to work cracking down on the service industry’s reporting of tips so that they could be taxed.”

In February 2023, the IRS released a proposed revenue procedure known as the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program.

The agency described SITCA as “a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries” that would include “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer’s point-of-sale system, and allowance for adjustments in tipping practices from year to year.”

Upon hearing Trump’s proposal delivered in June to a sizable crowd in Las Vegas, I immediately recalled a conversation I had with a waiter last year in Hoboken, New Jersey. In a progressive state that already taxes income heavily, this career waiter explained to me that he pays more taxes on his tips than ever before “because everyone uses their credit card nowadays. Nobody tips in cash anymore ever since COVID,” he explained. 

This seemingly random conversation, coupled with my own experience bussing tables in my early 20’s in Manhattan at the Houndstooth Pub, confirmed that another brilliant idea from the gut of Donald Trump has the American worker’s interests in mind.

As we’ve come to expect, in the face of criticism for such a “radical” idea (that was originally disparaged as a “Campaign Hail Mary” by the powerful Culinary Union in Nevada), Trump shrugs off the criticism and continually reminds American workers and families that his main goal when elected is to “Make America Great Again.”

Realizing that this election may be her only chance to become the President of the United States, Harris plagiarized his policy to pander to the sizable service industry in  an effort to undercut Trump’s advantage in the Silver State. If Trump is elected, he will enact the legislation drafted by Senator Ted Cruz and cosponsored,over a month later, by Nevada Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen.

A new tax policy is currently being legislated after Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 expires next year. Harris’ recently released economic policies have been trashed by CNN and compared to the disastrous policies of Venezuela, Argentina and the Soviet Union, yet her and Biden’s inflationary policies since 2021 have cost Nevadans an additional $32,554 annually for basic household expenses.

Despite the drain on Silver State pocketbooks and her Border Czar designation, Harris is running a competitive race, while the border is being overrun by illegal immigrants from nearly 200 countries and terrorists have been lost or released into our nation’s interior.

Recent polling from FiveThirtyEight show Trump with a three-point edge in Nevada. With six Electoral College votes up for grabs, we have to be honest with ourselves: Nevada is a swing state and Republicans haven’t won the top of the ticket since the 2004 presidential election. This means that if Trump wants to pull off a major upset, he is going to have to outdo Harris with additonal (and popular) outside-the-box policy ideas that made him a successful entrepreneur and an effective U.S. President.