“No tax on tips” is a bumper sticker-ready campaign jingle originally yelped by Donald Trump at the same Las Vegas rally in June where he so eloquently pondered death by shark versus death by electric boat.

Though shocking (pun intended), Trump’s wet battery vs. big fish story would not have as big an impact on the campaign cycle as his no tax on tips stunt. 

We can tell because no Democratic politicians have echoed Trump’s opposition to battery-powered boats. 

Yet.

Maybe Democrats are waiting for Culinary Workers Union Local 226 to declare its position on electric watercraft.

All aboard

Awarded imprimatur by the Culinary, Democrat politicians, including both Nevada’s U.S. senators and, last weekend, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, have parroted Trump’s call to end federal income taxes on tipped earnings.

Their support for the gimmick came after the Culinary – or as the national press always calls it, the “politically powerful” Culinary (the union appears to have its own entry in the the Official East Coast Mainstream Media Style Guide) – publicly concurred with Trump’s call to end income taxes on tips.

Democrats and the Culinary cuddling up with Trump campaign tchotchke makes sense, not on a policy level, but a political one.

The Culinary’s mission is to look out for its members. Its members who make tips would prefer not to pay taxes on those tips, because duh. And the Culinary would prefer that those members not vote for Trump, for a lot of reasons (perhaps not least being that the Culinary is backing Harris and if a critical mass of the union’s members voted for Trump, the union wouldn’t look – how does the national media put it? – oh right – powerful).

The Culinary had initially dissed Trump’s idea. “Relief is definitely needed for tip earners, but Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and wild campaign promises from a convicted felon,” the union said in a statement the day Trump uttered the official slogan of his 2024 campaign in Nevada, “no tax on tips.”

Hmm. If Culinary’s leadership believes Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and things that are the opposite of that, why did the Culinary make a big deal last year of having state lawmakers go through the motions of supporting an initiative to maybe possibly create a lottery someday? Even though under the most optimistic scenario the lottery wouldn’t produce a dime for youth mental health services until the end of the decade at the very earliest, if ever? And then why did the proposal disappear from public view as if it never existed?

Oops, sorry, I forgot. We’re supposed to politely forget about that, or pretend it didn’t happen. 

In any case, in what seems an admission that workers may not be as keen to draw distinctions between real solutions and wild campaign promises as Culinary leaders originally suggested, the Culinary quickly confirmed that yes, ending taxation of tips would be a fine thing.

Just like Trump said.

Harris, along with Nevada Democrats including and especially Sen. Jacky Rosen, who is up for reelection, would very much like the Culinary to live up to its brand and be as politically powerful as possible this year, in the union’s customary Democratic-friendly, door-knocking way. Rosen & Co. also embraced Trump’s call to end federal income taxes on tipped earnings.

And just like that, “no tax on tips” is the flavor of the month. 

It’s almost like it’s the new Yucca Mountain of Nevada politics. 

Except when it comes to Nevada-centric issues that can trigger Pavlovian responses from a critical mass of Nevada voters, there’s a huge difference between creating a giant nuclear waste dump and ending federal taxes on tipped income.

Yucca poses a potential and for all practical purposes permanent radioactive threat to public health and safety while forcing Nevadans to accept something they overwhelmingly don’t want. 

Eliminating federal taxation of tipped incomes, by contrast, might provide hedge fund managers yet another way to avoid paying taxes on their jillions, but mostly it’s just dumbed down political cotton candy.

In thrall to the Pied Piper of Mar-a-Lago

The Culinary, the Trump campaign, Rosen’s office, the campaign of Rosen’s opponent (and big time no tax on tips booster) Sam Brown, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s office – each of them have been asked how many Nevada workers would actually benefit if tips weren’t taxed, and what that average benefit might be, in dollar amounts.

Not one of them has provided an answer.

The closest thing to an answer that has surfaced since Trump bestowed the campaign cycle with his little present at Sunset Park in June might be an analysis from the Yale Budget Lab. That work estimates at least a third of tipped workers don’t make enough to pay any federal income taxes, and even for tipped workers who do make enough to pay federal income taxes, whatever tax relief the vast majority of them might receive would be slight to negligible.

More importantly, while a small group of unusually handsomely tipped workers may benefit, eliminating taxes on tips provides zero benefit to the far, far larger group of people in the low wage jobs that are among the most common in the state and who do not get tipped – people working in janitorial, home health care, retail, warehousing, security, office administration, and countless other employment sectors that typically don’t pay great.

Given the challenges facing those hundreds of thousands of Nevada workers, challenges that spill over into household stress and strain, it is a travesty for Democrats to follow Trump as if he’s the Pied Piper of Mar-a-Lago, and join him in prioritizing an incidental at best proposal like no tax on tips.

To be fair, at least Democrats are trying to leverage their humiliating acquiescence to Trump’s gimmickry into a ban on tipped wages – legally as low as $2.13 in some states. 

That would have no impact in Nevada, where paying subminimum wages to tipped workers is already illegal. But it would be beneficial for workers throughout much of the rest of the country, and should have been low-hanging fruit during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency when Democrats also controlled both houses of Congress.

There are other policies that, in stark contrast to eliminating taxes on tipped income, would substantially improve the lives of workers, tipped and untipped alike.

Harris will presumably be outlining some of them Friday in a scheduled address on economic issues. Hopefully, now that she’s been out of Nevada for a few days, cooler campaign heads will have prevailed and Harris won’t be regurgitating Trump’s no tax on tips drivel.

Ideally, if not Friday then later in the campaign, Harris will detail an agenda designed to improve working conditions, health and child care, housing and other economic considerations, proposals that will move the U.S. toward a more fair and sane economy in which workers don’t have to rely on tips in the first place.

One of the strongest narratives of the Harris campaign presents voters with a choice of going forward with her or going backward with Trump.

But by surrendering to a talking point popularized by a Republican, Rosen, Cortez Masto, and Harris are repeating a pernicious pattern that has bedeviled Democrats for decades, almost always at the expense of the public good.

Hopefully, no tax on tips will (like a Potemkin lottery proposal) soon be something that everyone will forget, and the focus can turn instead, as the Culinary put it, to “real solutions.”