Two month ago at a rally in Las Vegas, former President Trump recalled a conversation he had with a local waitress serving his table, lamenting that the government was taking too much from her. Trump imitated her in front of the crowd, “They come in and they take so much of our money, it’s just ridiculous.” There, he announced his No Tax On Tips policy.
This past Saturday, Vice President Harris announced that she was adopting the platform, also at a Las Vegas rally.
“It is my promise to everyone here when I am president we will continue to fight for working families, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Trump hammered Harris on her constant and characteristic flip flopping — and this is just the latest example. In 2022, Harris cast the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, that demanded stricter reporting of tipping so that waiters, bartenders, and other service industry professionals could be taxed on them.
After the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, Joe Biden went on to boast that it created $80 billion in funding for the IRS.
Just days before announcing her support of “No Tax On Tips” her official Facebook page shared a video of her casting the vote that created a tax on tips. The video appears to have been deleted.
The same day she made her support of the policy public, Nevada’s Culinary Union, which represents roughly 60,000 hospitality workers, endorsed her.
Following the statement, Trump fumed on Truth Social.
“Kamala Harris, whose ‘Honeymoon’ period is ENDING, and is starting to get hammered in the Polls, just copied my NO TAXES ON TIPS Policy. The difference is, she won’t do it, she just wants it for Political Purposes! This was a TRUMP idea—She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”
In another post to Truth Social, he wrote, “Kamala has no imagination, whatsoever, as shown by the fact that she played ‘COPYCAT’ with, NO TAXES ON TIPS!”
Harris has been especially slow to announce concrete policy, and has yet to publish a full platform on her campaign website, leaving voters and political professionals with questions and concerns. In the three weeks since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, she’s had zero substantive interactions with the press. Many believe she’s trying to distance herself from her far left record, and that she’s avoiding adversarial questions about it.
While the strategy probably isn’t sustainable, it makes some sense. When confronted with her prosecutorial record by another presidential hopeful in 2020, she completely fumbled her response, and quickly fell from frontrunner in a crowded field to single digit polling, and dropped out of the race shortly after.
Soon after Trump announced this proposal, the Republican Party embraced it, incorporating the idea into the Republican National Committee’s official 2024 platform, and Senator Ted Cruz introduced legislation that eliminated the federal income tax on tips.
