politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Looks like many haven't read the article before commenting. While both candidates have a proposal about the same topic, the methodology of implementing this seems to differ greatly.
The reaction in the comments appears to reflect more of the potential outcome of the Trump plan, though the Trump plan seems to mainly be some cobbled together bits of some other Republican proposals.
From the article, the Harris plan goes along with a minimum wage increase and an income cap so higher wage workers can't collect tax free "tips" in lieu of taxable income.
I also looked up some implications of elimination of taxed tips and found this article that goes into some numbers and shows how raising the standard deduction to make more workers, not just tipped workers, exempt from income tax and benefit many more people. I thought that was interesting and provided more seemingly useful info than either candidates' campaign promises.
The solution would be to increase the lowest tax bracket then.
That's another fine suggestion.
The numbers didn't really look in line for today's incomes, and from what I can tell from this, tax brackets for anything but the highest earners haven't changed other than an inflation adjustment since the 80s.
The us also has a $14,600 standard deduction that effectively adds a 0% bracket and increases the lower thresholds by that amount (people in the higher thresholds would probably itemize, decreasing their effective tax even further).
The IRS does index the tax brackets for inflation.
Also, that table does not include state taxes.
There is a lot more to it than the table. I think it was OP's article mentioned that there were bills circulating to eliminate the state income tax on tips as well as just the federal.
I mentioned some of the other taxes in my other replies a bit, but other than paying taxes, I'm not much of an expert. Plus if most people couldn't be bothered to read the original article, I'm not going to look up a bunch more data they won't read. 😁
Our taxes could be worse, but they could also be much better. I don't know if these tip tax plans will do much, as it's <3% of people making tipped income according to the article if I'm remembering it right from yesterday. Something that would help the bottom 50% of earners seems like it would be worth the effort instead, instead of cementing tip culture as a substitute for fair wages, but that's just my opinion.
I've only ever lived in states that don't have state taxes, only federal. That said every place I worked when I was younger had people just lying about their tips by claiming they only made tips that came from cards and pocketed all their tips from cash and never reported it. As cash has slowly disappeared more and more I'm sure that is dying off but tips were never a good thing for society. They are "politically correct" bribes. Then when companies realize customers will bribe their workers to be more helpful they got greedy and started taking those bribes. To which we made laws about stealing their bribes, so they paid politicians to make minimum wage separate for commonly bribed positions, effectively making it legal to steal bribes from their workers.
Making a portion of jobs qualify to not be taxable in parts of their income and not others regardless of tax brackets would be unresponsible. We are complicating a system that doesn't need to be more complicated, and all that does is make more room for loopholes and exploitation (whether it be if the worker or of the taxes that should have been paid).
My experience talking with waitstaff friends mirrors yours.
They all swear they're getting the better end of the deal because they have good nights, but there's gotta be dead nights where they make nothing, and I can't imagine disability or unemployment is good when your wage is $2/hr.
To me it's passing the cost of labor onto customers in a less than transparent manner, and with wage theft by employers seeming to be a problem with restaurant staff, I don't know how you can prove stolen cash tips.
It varies, usually the ones I knew would make more money than those working back of house without an issue. Back of house would get paid say $10 an hour and work a 9 hour shift. Front would come in for 6 hours and leave with ~$150. Creating a natural divide between the two.