Trump Says His Plan to Renew 2017 Tax Cuts Will Pay for Itself

The bipartisan embrace of the idea comes as both campaigns are seeking to court key voting groups in Nevada and other battleground states.

Trump’s comments come a day after Harris formally accepted her party’s presidential nomination, setting the two candidates off on a sprint to Election Day. Harris used her acceptance speech to highlight some of her policy proposals in broad terms, saying she would be an advocate for the middle class and implement measures to bring down costs for households.

Courting Service-Industry Workers

Trump has made “no tax on tips” a centerpiece of his stump speech, and his campaign is employing guerrilla marketing tactics to promote the policy. Donors to his campaign can receive stickers that read “VOTE TRUMP FOR NO TAX ON TIPS” to put on their restaurant checks.

Harris, too, chose Las Vegas to make a similar campaign promise to cut taxes on tips — although her proposal would apply only to federal income taxes and leave payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare intact.

Natalie DeNardo, a mortgage broker who attended the event on Friday, said her father is a bartender at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas and he would feel a “huge impact” from the proposed no-tax-on-tips policy. When asked about Harris supporting the same policy, she was skeptical.

“She’s just jumping on the bandwagon,” said DeNardo, 41. “She could have done this in the past three and a half years if she really wanted to.”

Exempting tipped wages from federal levies has the potential to trim the tax bills of the more than 6 million hospitality workers who reported a total of $38.3 billion in tipped income in 2018, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data are available. That averages out to about $6,250 per tipped worker.

Despite their overlap on the so-called no-tax-on-tips policy, Trump is pushing for sweeping tax cuts aimed at corporations and higher earners, while Harris is taking over President Joe Biden’s lead, championing proposals to raise the corporate rate to 28% from 21% and hiking taxes on the wealthy, while pledging not to raise taxes on earners making less than $400,000.

Credit: Bloomberg