I’ve never been behind the no tax on tips or overtime. Those items are income, income is taxed. Period. But even worse is taxing money you don’t even have.
Choice Between Republicans’ Bad Economic Ideas and Democrats’ Worse Economic Ideas
Commentators on both sides of the political aisle have had much to say about the idea of a law which would exempt service workers’ tips from taxation.
Trump supporters, in particular, seemed to love the idea when he brought it to the table, because it brings new potential voters into the growing tent. Lots of young people work in service jobs and earn tips, after all, and few of them have voted Republican in recent years.
When the Harris campaign adopted this position, some in the Trump camp were angry that she’d steal his idea. But there’s no hypocrisy in that. It’s just an entirely left-wing proposition that Democrats now wish they would have floated before Trump did.
Here are undeniable facts. Income is taxed by our federal government, and tips are a form of income. [emphasis mine]
Now, if you want to argue that income should not be taxed by the federal government, I couldn’t possibly be more in favor of your position on the matter. But since income is taxed, the question at hand is how income can be taxed fairly.
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Follows is a discussion on what is fair: our progressive taxing system is straight out of the mind of Karl Marx, after all. The urge to not tax tips assumes that tip earners work in jobs that put them in the lower income brackets. (Never mind that nowadays in America, *everyone* expects tips for darn near everything.) That assumption is not always true, nor is it always fair.
I agree with the author of the article: it’s vote buying time, and nothing is off the table. Student loans. Untaxable tips. Down payment money for houses. No taxes on overtime. (WTH??!!)
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Are conservatives actually suggesting that such broad and ridiculous tax carve-outs approach anything resembling a morally correct position? Beyond that, do we accept the suggestion that the appropriate role of government is to discriminate against individual workers based upon job description and employment arrangements in such ways?
/SNIP
But as terrible as the Republican ideas-turned-slogans like “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” are, Democrats are promoting the most economically destructive policy imaginable, and it is an idea that carries with it nothing short of the death of individual liberty and private property in America.
And that policy is the notion of a federal wealth tax, an affront to liberty so severe that its implementation would reshape our nation in ways that will make it unrecognizable to anyone who ever lived as an American up to this point.
The media are attempting to give this idea legitimacy by calling it an “unrealized capital gains tax.” Most Americans rarely think about capital gains in their daily lives, and this is why the capital gains tax rate has far more potential for dramatic fluctuation than the income tax rate — most people do not think that a “capital gains” tax hike will negatively impact them.
The idea that a “capital gain” can be legally taxed by the federal government derives from the Sixteenth Amendment, and this is important. Until 1913 when the Amendment was ratified, the Constitution only allowed for indirect “Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Direct taxes could only be applied if apportioned among the states according to the Census.
The original idea was that there would be a voluntary nature to federal taxation — you could choose to not buy an imported good and suffer the costs incurred by tariffs, or you could choose to not pay excise taxes by not buying whiskey, for example. The Sixteenth Amendment changed all of that, and allowed the federal government to directly seize a citizen’s “income, from whatever source derived.”
What this means is that a transfer of money into your hands is required for it to be federally taxable, and that “from whatever source derived” does a lot of heavy lifting in tax law.
/SNIP
What’s never happened before, and what is nothing short of the death of individual liberty and the end of America as we know it, is the suggestion that wealth that has not yet been transferred into an American individual’s hands is ripe for legal taxation by the government.
Once this door is open, there is no closing it. If the government claims for itself the right to forcibly confiscate your property based upon the current value of your investment holdings prior to your ever selling them or collecting the value upon them, then the government can do anything it wants without any limitation. [emphasis mine]
/snip
Donald Trump has pitched some pretty bad economic ideas in this campaign cycle. I certainly don’t love it, but he is clearly the better pick for American conservatives in this election cycle. And that is particularly because, if for no other reason, Kamala Harris is presenting is the most devastating economic idea that could ever be introduced in this country, accompanied by the most destructive social agenda, the most inept foreign policy prescriptions, and is arguably the most unlikable and unqualified presidential candidate in American history.
Perhaps that’s the result when one party decides that its voters don’t matter in selecting a candidate.
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