“no Tax on Tips” Includes Digital Creators, Too

More like chastity auctions, am I right?

The exemption doesn't apply to performance artists

In 14 days, you hit the cap. In 75 days, you start to hit the phase out band.

The employers already had all kinds of bizarre tricks to keep tipped workers down.

My girlfriend works for a local chain restaurant. Some of the things she tells me about seem like they shouldn’t be legal (forcing everyone’s cash tips to be pooled with non tipped teenagers they don’t want to pay, for example. Pretty sure the company has had previous class actions against them. This was just a small local chain in a middle/upper middle class suburb.

I saw a post on Nextdoor the other day where another restaurant closed, laying off the workers without paying them for hours worked. The general consensus about how to get the money you worked for: you don’t. The state has no labor board and there was little option for recourse.

>Why aren’t capital gains taxed at a higher rate than income?

The federal capital gains rates are higher than the effective tax rates paid by a family making a median income, but I suspect you are asking why the capital gains rates are not higher than the highest marginal rates.

One issue is simply that capital gains tax rates generally don't account for inflation. If you build a business over a few decades and sell it, much of the increase in value will be simply due to inflation. Do you want to encourage long term investment, or make it so only financially illiterate people do long term investments?

Because rich people earn more from capital gains than income?

Towards what? No taxes at all? That's not desirable if you want things like public schools and rule of law.

And if you want more progressive taxation, then support more progressive taxation. Treating classes of workers differently is not a way to get to more equitable progressive taxation.

No, you're renting the physical space -- a scarce part of the commons -- from your community.

(I do think property taxes should be a land-value tax and not include improvements you've built.)

Places like that exist. You should try living there, see how you like the quality of life.

I'm a libertarian but I know it is impossible for a society to exist without even just a few taxes.

If you look at tax brackets plus the standard deduction lowering the bracket it affects, it will be a flat or regressive change in take home income amongst the cohort until at $90K or maybe a bit more, double median income, where you can start writing off against the 22% bracket. Assuming 50% tips.

I've seen that same figure for YT ad revenue alone. sponsorships can range from $0.015-0.030 per video for channels with 1k to 50k subscribers.

at a biweekly cadence, they'd need ~6M views per video to hit $150k with ads alone. if you figure another $0.025 per view for sponsorships, then they would need 6M views per year or about 240K per video.

looking at Patreon stats, it seems reasonable to assume that a channel with 25K subscribers could pull in about 1K Patreon subs with effort. if each is paying $5/mo, then that would add another $60K/yr in revenue (though I imagine a lot of that would get eaten up by fees and extra costs.

you don't use adblock?

Nothing wrong with giving money to your kids in general. That income has already been taxed. If they were paying the kids for pretend work and taking a deduction for the higher-income parents, that'd be different.

My bright line rule is that I won't tip before service is rendered. If I'm asked before, I can't judge the service, and therefore making a tip decision is impossible.

With a small amount of sadness, this is the conclusion I'm starting to end up with. Yes I think waitresses and service workers should make more money. But tipping in the US has become opaque, expanding everywhere, and the expectations around tipping seem to be getting ratcheted up constantly. A business is not viable if customers have to pay your employees separately. I'm close to hitting the nuclear button and just defaulting to zero.

The problem stems less from how it might have originated and more from what it results in.

Multiple times I've been travelling for dinner with coworkers and someone notes "oh, tip is already included here" (be it the group size, the way the place works normally, or whatever reason) and then half the table starts redoing the receipt because they were tricked into it. This example highlights it's not always about intent, work already has a set policy of how to tip (i.e. no generosity or etc involved), people are just getting plain tricked into doing something else instead. Regardless - it's successful in the growth of tips, so it spreads.

Similarly, "just click skip and move on" puts the friction in the wrong direction - especially if you're not alone. It's great that it can apply a lot of the time, but the problem is it has friction, sometimes strong, in certain scenarios - again, this friction is only weighted towards the growth of tips.

Lastly, the vast majority of people have some level of desire to be fair, even if they don't want to be generous. Any uncertainty which can be created in the tipping process ("am I supposed to tip here?", "is the tip in the service charge, if so how much goes to the person/how much were they expecting to get in total?", "is the recommended tip on the receipt more than I expected", and so on) tends to push people to tip more than their generosity alone would have inclined, and it's really quite unfair to say the solution is to just click skip and hope all will understand each time.

Unfortunately, there is pretty much nothing pushing in the opposite direction. Your options as an individual, or even sizable portion of society, are to shit on the wait staff's income about it in hopes they complain enough that management gives them a better salary (that'd take quite the movement). Everything about this side has the exact opposite incentive pressures as the above, and so whether particularly generous folks are a factor or not... there's really nothing that's going to get done about it for the typical person.

Maybe we can start some place in the middle of "being able to walk into a place and understand what the cost will be up front", such as including tax in the base prices of things, and it'll open more doors about tipping for the same consideration. Until then, we all are stuck with dealing with it.

The most frustrating thing has been the tip prompt that happens before service has been rendered. A tip is based on service. If you haven't received the service yet, the fuck is the tip meant to reflect? That you succeeded at breathing?

Happened to me once in Thailand, I was very surprised.

Truly USA is an overpriced country with the only good thing being that jobs are high paying… and that’s it.

I think the best thing in life is to have a remote job somehow + travel 50% of the time + stay w friends and family 50% of the time

I was in Japan last month, tipped 4 times, once it ended up awkward with the waiter insisting me to take it back, the other 3 times they accepted it gladly and thanked.

> the top 1% still pay 40+% of federal taxes

No. They pay 40% of Federal income tax, specifically.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fact-check-richest-1...

> The bottom 50% pay no taxes

Same mistake here. They pay plenty of payroll etc. tax.

> The bottom 50% pay no taxes and the top 1% still pay 40+% of federal taxes.

This tells us nothing unless we know how their relative income shares. If the bottom 50% earns only 20% of all income (just an example) this is quite fair. If they earn 60%, it's unfair.

The number of people who just trot out this statistic without context is quite tiresome.

And of course everyone pays sales tax, property tax (even if they're a renter), payroll tax and so on.

> That deduction was worth $100K to a $1M/year income in a 10% State income tax state earner.

What? Income deductions are only worth the marginal tax rate on that income -- ~40% on $100k of income deducted is worth ~$40k. (With the $10k SALT cap, he can still deduct $10k, worth about $4k.) The top bracket being reduced from 40% to 37%, and starting at a higher income threshold, likely saved the same high earner more than $36k.

I think ultimately very few people really care about simplifying the tax code. The cost of a complex tax code is the $19.95-$200 cost of preparing your taxes, which everyone would gladly eat if it meant they could take advantage of tax deductions on pages 1,455, 19,210 and 245,908 of the tax code totaling > the cost of tax prep.

Simplifies tax collection process ≠ Simplifies tax code

A few lines of tax code means millions of people don't have to worry about unpredictable withholdings due to significant changes in tips from day to day, month to month, and year to year.

Also, what's sloppy about it? It's just a deduction for up to a maximum amount from tips, for a specified list of occupations, with the maximum decreasing as income increases above a specified level. That's pretty simple, as far as tax code goes. What do you think would be a less sloppy way of implementing it?

And? He's not a caricature of the far left?

Well, the "Lincoln GOP" was also generally in favor of tearing down and burning confederate flags, so I think it makes more sense to compare things over a shorter time-periods like "in living memory."

Parent poster's explicit "two decades back" scale is entirely reasonable for the phenomenon they are pointing out.