Kamala Harris has copied a campaign promise first announced in June by former President Donald Trump that will eliminate taxes on tips.
But it was Harris herself who cast the deciding vote in 2022 on legislation that provided funding enabling the IRS to track and tax tips.
On Aug. 7, 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. It provided $80 billion in additional funding to the IRS to deploy agents to track the tips of service industry workers so that they could be taxed.
Two years later, Harris claimed during a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday that she would work to “eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
Social media users reacted to Harris’s claims with the hashtag #CopyCatKamala, pointing out that Trump had announced during a rally in Las Vegas in June that his administration would “not charge taxes on tips.”
Three days before her flip-flop, Harris was praising her record: “Two years ago today, I proudly cast the tie-breaking vote to pass our Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris’s Facebook account reminded the public on Wednesday, sharing a video of Harris voting to pass the legislation.
Reason magazine reported in 2023, that the White House claimed it would “make our tax code fairer by cracking down on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations.”
“It now appears that some of those resources — will, quite predictably, be aimed at individuals earning considerably less,” the report continued.
Flush with the new funding, the IRS in February 2023 touted a proposed revenue procedure known as the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program.
The agency described SITCA as “a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries” that would include “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer’s point-of-sale system, and allowance for adjustments in tipping practices from year to year.”
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“There’s no reason they’d be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary,” Americans for Tax Reform’s Mike Palicz told Fox News at the time. “Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can.” “They told us they’re not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less,” Palicz added. “Well, here’s a new IRS rule that’s focused on bringing in tips from waitresses.”Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich...
They're coming after waitresses' tips now: "monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer's point-of-sale system."https://t.co/WAvh0t2cNN — Mike Palicz (@Mike_Palicz) February 7, 2023
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