this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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How is this fair to wage/salaried workers? Why not eliminate taxes (income and payroll both) up to $60k income?
I would suggest it's more like a gift, which is only taxed after an obscene amount.
Also, frankly I'd suggest not looking at it like it's unfair to give this to them and instead look at it more like, good for them, now how can we help hourly and salaried workers? I'm not going to punch down at service workers, myself.
There was talk of not taxing overtime (although the details of the plan are such garbage that it wouldn't actually help very many people). Something like that might help hourly workers similarly.
Salaried workers and workers like myself who are only nominally hourly ( the expectation is that I will book exactly 40 hours every week) are still left out, but I'm doing alright and would be happy to see others taken better care of first.
It's literally part of their wage. The restaurants pay them less than the normal minimum per hour because they are tipped employees.
I'm afraid I'm missing your point. Are you responding to the fact that it's more like a gift? It was an analogy not a perfect 1:1 mapping. This doesn't change anything about my response.
My point is is it's not a gift if it's basically socially required for customers to directly pay the workers their fair share of their wage (which decreases the amount of payroll taxes the employer owes)
Okay. Look, we could dig into the nuances, but likening it to a gift was only to invoke the precedent of not taxing cash gifts, but if you don't like the analogy then don't worry about the precedent.
Either way, the point is that service workers are paid shit, even with tips, and I'm not going to begrudge them some tax savings. I have frequently gone out of my way to tip in cash just to enable them to do so.
I'm suspicious of this tax "cut", why are Republicans supporting this when they hate the working class?. I think it's just for optics, in reality it doesn't change much for most people.
I understand your skepticism. In Michigan they are proposing to exempt seniors (70+) from property tax, which seems good to me, but I'm suspicious as hell that it's a Republican proposing it.
Could just be it's a gimme to their base, but I'm suspicious it's more nefarious.
It's to prime the voters to vote a specific way. I lived in Texas for some time and the state constitution was a total fucking mess that had to be amended by ballot measure.
The pattern was like this:
Exempting the people who own most of the property from having to pay property tax is a great way to bankrupt schools and fire stations...
Do 70+ year olds own most of the property? I don't know the proportion of property owned by 70 year olds. You could be right.
My personal experience is that people are transitioning to assisted living around that time. Also by keeping the property owned instead of allowing it to be moved to a trust, that has inheritance tax implications, and it also is going to require the property to be sold and that money all spent before medicaid will cover a nursing home.
It's complicated and interacts with a number of other things going on, which is why I'm struggling to understand all the implications.
Tips are a small business kulak way to depress the wage they're paying. I see it as cynical support to keep the minimum wage down and introduce tipping into more retail jobs.
The bill explicitly states that the secretary of treasury may declare new jobs as "traditionally tipped". So not only do tips enjoy legal protection but this will now be used as an anchor to prevent those industries from ever paying reasonable wages.