Hiltzik: Whose tips policy is better for workers, Trump’s or Harris’?

Every four years, the just-toss-an-idea-out-there phase of the presidential race precedes the serious campaigning that starts after Labor Day.

The flavor of the moment is the idea of exempting tips from federal taxes. Donald Trump proposed it during an appearance in June in Las Vegas (home to a lot of restaurant and hotel workers who depend on tips).

Kamala Harris offered her version a few days ago during a rally of her own, also in Las Vegas. That prompted Trump to whine on social media that she had poached his idea.

Are you tired of this yet?

Hang on, because there’s more to say, starting with the fact that a tax exemption for tips on its own won’t do much good for the many low-income workers who count tips as an important part of their income.

Second, this is hardly a new idea — it has been kicking around the political world since at least the 1980s. California exempted tips from state tax (with some conditions) in 2015.

A tax exemption for tips is a crowd-pleaser, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Trump’s version, and a bill introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) to put meat on its bones, are half-baked.

Harris paired hers with a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage, which is a much better policy.

If all this jockeying is the two parties vying to be more family-friendly, the crown goes to the Democrats, hands down.

Let’s place the issue under a microscope.

Since Trump hasn’t given any details, we have to use the Cruz/Donalds No Tax on Tips Act as a signpost for the GOP approach. The measure exempts tips from federal income tax, but not from the payroll tax that funds Social Security and part of Medicare. It applies only to households that pay federal income taxes — it’s not refundable, meaning that it doesn’t provide any benefit to households whose income is so low they don’t owe federal taxes.

That leaves out all but “a small sliver” of American workers, according to economist Ernie Tedeschi of the Yale Budget Lab. He counts the number of workers in traditional tipped occupations, including wait staff, barbers and hairdressers, at about 4 million, or just 2.5% of all workers.

“A meaningful share of tipped workers already pay zero federal income tax,” Tedeschi notes.

U.S. census data drive home his point: More than a third of tipped workers earned so little in 2022 that they owed no federal income tax. In other words, they’d receive zero benefit from the Republican act.

Another flaw of the bill is its lack of guardrails to ensure that only low-income tipped workers receive its benefits. Nowhere in the three-page measure are tips defined, nor is there a phase-out of the tax break based on income. This raises the possibility that higher-income households could game the system by defining some of their earnings as tips and pocketing the deduction.

Nothing would “prevent high-income professionals such as hedge fund managers from shifting their compensation to a tax-free tipping model,” observes Brendan Duke of the liberal Center for American Progress.

That mention of “hedge fund managers” shows that the folks at CAP know how their audience would react to another giveaway to plutocrats, but it’s hard to deny that the wealthy are masters of exploiting any tax break that could conceivably save them money.

The biggest problem with the Republican approach is that it operates in a vacuum, as if exempting tips from income tax is all that needs to be done to vest the GOP with pro-family cred. It’s not. Far more gains would be achieved by extending enhancements to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit that were enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021.

The EITC and Child Tax Credit enhancements expired at the end of 2021. Efforts by the Biden White House and its Democratic allies on Capitol Hill to extend them failed, due mostly to Republican opposition. Under the Rescue Plan, the child tax credit was increased to an annual $3,000 per child ($3,600 for children under age 6), from $2,000 per child. The measure raised the maximum age of children eligible for the credit to 17 from 16.

Even more important, the credit was made fully refundable, meaning that it went to families regardless of whether or how much they paid in federal income taxes. The American Rescue Plan also eliminated the preexisting program’s work incentives, which reduced the credit for lower-income families. When the enhancements expired, the child credit fell back to $2,000 per child and reduced the refundable portion to $1,700.

As CAP calculates, many of the low-income households that would receive nothing from the No Tax on Tips Act — a single parent with one child, living on $24,000 income mostly from tips, a student working part-time or a married couple earning less than $30,000 — would receive benefits of up to $2,600 from restoration of the American Rescue Plan credits.

The enhanced Child Tax Credit reduced the child poverty rate by about 30%, keeping as many as 3.7 million children out of poverty by the end of 2021. When the enhancements expired in January, the child poverty rate spiked to 17% from 12.1%, plunging 3.7 million children back under the poverty line. The impact was much worse on Black, Latino and Asian children than on white ones.

In other words, if the Republicans wished to be pro-family really, not just rhetorically, they would have clamored to extend the credits.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, whose mouth writes checks his campaign can’t cash, says he’s in favor of the child tax credit and even wants to raise it as high as $5,000 per child. Couple of problems here: First, he surely knows that his Republican colleagues in Congress would never support such a large grant to families, and second, when a more modest increase came up to the Senate floor two weeks ago, Vance didn’t even show up to vote.

How about Harris’ proposal?

What she said in Las Vegas was this: “We will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” Nestled within that statement are two very important distinctions from the Trump or Republican proposal.

First is a raise in the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Had the minimum kept pace with inflation, it would be $10.79 today. In seven states, the federal wage applies — five that have not enacted a minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee) and two (Georgia and Wyoming) where the state minimum is lower than $7.25, meaning that the federal wage is the law.

Harris also specified service and hospitality workers, which obviously means she would exclude professionals gaming the law. Whether she would do so by phasing out the benefit by income or specifically identifying eligible occupations isn’t clear.

Despite her careful phrasing, conservative commentators and not a few actual journalistic organizations fell into the trap of treating Harris’ proposal as a copycat of Trump’s.

The right-wing pundit Mary Katherine Ham, whose determination to tell it like it is was hampered by her lack of knowledge, tweeted that if Harris is “just gonna copy and paste Trump’s site, she doesn’t need another week or two to debut it.”

Obviously, if Ham spent two minutes examining the proposals, she wouldn’t have made this claim. But her error matched those of, for example, CBS News, which reported in headline syntax that Harris was “echoing Trump proposal.”

The distinction was also lost on the Wall Street Journal, which accused Harris of “borrowing a Trump idea.” Never mind that the idea wasn’t Trump’s in the first place. The Times, I’m sorry to say, picked up an Associated Press account that described Harris as “echoing a pledge that her opponent, Republican Donald Trump, has made, and marking a rare instance of political overlap from both sides.”

Budget deficit hawks have also weighed in. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that is an offspring of the late hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, wrung its hands over the potential cost of Harris’ plan, based on a conjecture that she would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The committee estimated that, combined with an income tax exemption, her plan would cost the federal government as much as $200 billion over 10 years. Is that a lot?

The Congressional Budget Office projects that annual federal budgets will total about $19.6 trillion over the next 10 years, making the cost of the minimum wage and tip exemption come to about 1% of federal outlays during that time.

You make the call. Two of the most expensive tax breaks in federal law are the exemptions for contributions and earnings for pension and individual retirement accounts, and the preferential tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Both disproportionately benefit the wealthy. Combined, they come to $680 billion a year; the minimum wage increase and tip exemption would cost an average $20 billion a year.

Some people might think that an important goal of the federal government should be providing for the most vulnerable members of society. The current system, especially after a massive tax break was enacted by the Republicans and signed by Trump in 2017, is heavily skewed toward comforting the wealthy.

If the parties and their candidates want to play the pro-family card, one can’t really blame them for seizing on a policy that sounds great on TV. Only one of the parties has gone beyond a tax exemption on tips and has favored truly comprehensive pro-family policies. Can you see which one?