Why it matters: Typically, ideas like these are tough to turn into reality, but next year when the Trump tax cuts expire, Congress will likely pass some kind of new tax bill.
- That creates an opportunity to put new policies in place, says Brendan Duke of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The intrigue: Where things start to get wild is outside the restaurant industry, as Americans try to figure out ways to classify more of their income as tips. Think bankers’ bonuses or sales commissions — or even pay for a Substack writer or freelance podcaster.
- The U.S. tax code already has different rules for different kinds of income — capital gains, for example, are taxed at a lower rate than payroll income.
- When those kinds of divides happen, you create enormous incentives for people to game the system, says Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
- Those kinds of shenanigans typically happen with higher earners — think of the carried interest tax loophole, for example.
For the record: An official from the Harris campaign said the policy would include “strict requirements to prevent hedge fund managers and lawyers from structuring their compensation in ways to try to take advantage of the policy.”
- Trump’s campaign hasn’t offered much in the way of detail.
I’m leaning towards horrible. If your tips are tax-free, I’m gonna cut your wages. What do you care? Go out there and make more tips! Shake that money maker, honey!
And why should waitresses and bar staff have all the luck? Doesn’t everyone deserve tax-free tips? Tip your grocery cashier! Tip your nurse! Tip the guy at the bank who approves the loan you need to afford giving tips to everyone, as the weight of providing a living to everyone you interact with shifts away from the business owners and shareholders and onto your shoulders!
If a hospital in the US started paying their nurses the same minimum wage that a server gets, that hospital would suddenly be without nurses and it would be entirely the hospital’s fault.
They won’t drop them to $2.50/hr or whatever the ridiculousness currently is, they’ll just not give them any raises or start them at $10k lower than the non-tipped hospital. And the nurses will do the math and decide is still works out for them because the tips make up for it. The end result being the business pays less for their employees and the customer pays more.
What makes you think people will go from tipping $10 on a $40-50 meal, to tipping, say, $100 on a $400-500 medical bill? Or $1,000 on a $4,000-5,000 one? Or even more? Do you think that insurance is going to cover tips for nurses? Do you think every nurse in a given hospital is going to stay there instead of getting a job somewhere else that doesn’t expect them to take tips, especially when they realize that nobody is tipping them?
What makes you think they won’t? How much is it worth you when you’re feeling miserable to have a nurse that checks on you every 10 minutes instead of every hour? How much gratitude do you have for personal attention when you need help rather than just carrying food to a table?
And like all places that transition to tips, they probably won’t just say “we take tips now, -$10k”, they’ll first add it as an option for “an extra thank you” that then becomes factored into the salaries they offer to new nurses and the raises they give to existing employees.
See, there’s a crucial difference in the two professions. A server is someone who brings your food, takes your check, and generally doesn’t do much else. A nurse, on the other hand, needs to balance the life-saving care of dozens of patients at once while dealing with administrative bullcrap the whole time. People tip servers well to incentivize them to spend less time on their phones and dropping plates, and more time carrying food and recording orders accurately. You can’t do that with nurses because they can’t possibly give any more of their time. 91% of nurses experienced high levels of burnout in 2023,, and I’m dead certain that a lot of that is the insane workload. Twelve hour shifts working with uncaring staff and pissed-off patients must be soul-crushing. Then for your employer to try and disguise your looming pay cuts as “a way to give your healthcare heroes a special thank you” would probably cause an exodus from the profession; people can see through that stuff pretty easily.
You’re still assuming this is going to be an immediate industry-wide thing, too. Like I said, people will see through the corporate bs, and they’ll learn at some point that they can go to another hospital, not be expected to beg for tips from their suffering patients, and get paid more than the place that was lowballing them. Word of mouth is powerful. There’s an entire cottage industry of Canadian nurses who cross the border into America for work because they’re so dissatisfied with the Canadian system. Your scenario only works in a setting where there is only one nationwide hospital system that decides the market rate for nursing, and that people wouldn’t decide not to become nurses after seeing that they’re expected to tip them. We already see a nursing shortage because they’re being treated so poorly; trying to make it a tipped industry would only make it worse.
As for the “would you?” thing, I can speak from a degree of personal experience here. I was in the psych ward in May and I was waiting for over ten hours in there to see a psychiatrist. I was tired, hungry, bored, and scared of what might happen to me. I was in no way equipped to make financial decisions at that point, and I get the feeling that the medical field would consider taking tips from someone who was in such an emotionally frail state to be unethical at best. (Oh yeah, and they took away my wallet. Couldn’t give them cash if I wanted to.) My insurance made the cost of going there “reasonable,” (mostly because I wasn’t actually admitted,) but if the hospital expected me to tip the staff there, it would be nonsensical. How would you determine what the tip should be based on? The pre-insurance amount? That’s like $5,000 there if I’m lucky, and 20% of that is $1,000 on a bill I only paid like $275 for. One word: No. The post-insurance amount? That’s $27.50. A pittance compared to how much time and effort went into taking care of me, including the time it took to become a nurse to begin with. Furthermore, I would be so removed from the process of sending the tip that by the time the money reached the nurse(s) who helped me, they would only know me as a name on a bill at best. And again, would insurance be willing to cover the cost of a tip?
Servers work their backsides off. Firstly, those trays are backbreaking, then they fill condiments, wrap silver, if they’re not finished with that by the time customers leave their tables, and they can’t fill condiments while customers are at the table. Sweetener packets must all be turned the same way. Tables must be sanitized, windows cleaned, the floors swept or vacuumed or mopped, often sanitized. Who do you think cleans and sanitizes the bathrooms? Helps get the kitchen staff caught up?
They do, but the fact remains that you can’t effectively incentivize people to work more for you personally when they’re already soul-crushingly overworked doing things for everyone else in their rotation. Trying to get more out of nurses who are in the industry already would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Also, you don’t go to college for several years to be a server. If people realize they’re going to have to beg for tips from their patients, then that won’t bode well for the profession.