Kamala Harris launched IRS harassment of tipped workers in 2022, breaking tie vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act
Like John Kerry, Kamala Harris was for it before she was against it. And Harris, who used to keep petty drug offenders in prison beyond their terms, has always had a mean streak for the little guy, not to mention, her own staff.
So what a surprise to learn that shortly after she brazenly stole President Trump's idea to end taxes on tips, Harris came out with the same proposal as if it were her own.
I suppose there's no law against it, but there is Harris's record, which is why Trump made the call to end taxes on tips in the first place.
Fox News's Liz MacDonald laid it out very well:
Kamala Harris’s first big policy idea is to steal Trump’s “no taxes on tips,” when she backed Democrats’ $80b for more IRS audits including on tip income. The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants… pic.twitter.com/DO3Z6gKHu0
— Elizabeth MacDonald (@LizMacDonaldFOX) August 11, 2024
So remember the badly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the government spendathon which brought us so much of the inflation we have now?
It was in that bill that 80,000 newly minted IRS agents would be hired, supposedly to go after all the billionaire tax cheats out there.
The U.S. billionaire count, according to Forbes magazine, is 813. Kamala played the key role in getting that law passed.
Kamala Harris, who now claims to be against taxing tips, was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the IRS so it could go after people not paying taxes on tips.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) August 11, 2024
Incredible stuff. The most inauthentic, astro-turfed campaign in history. pic.twitter.com/9Nne61oJPi
And with just 813 billionaires to harass, who did those 80,000 go after? That's right, the little guys, especially the ones who are paid in tips.
The Wall Street Journal's editorial page found a Treasury report indicating that middle class taxpayers were getting the brunt of the IRS offensive, which would also include some tip workers. Tips, after all, are easy pickings for underreporting owing to the lack of paper trail:
President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class.
Those are two findings of the IRS’s watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta). The report examines IRS progress on mandates from the Biden Administration backed by tens of billions in new funding. The first supposed goal was to audit more ultrawealthy and fewer middle-class filers, but it’s not going so well.
...
The most recent data suggests the IRS is still focused on the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000.
It gets worse, and here is where the second half of McDonald's tweet is described: With all that new federal money brought to them by Kamala Harris's tie-breaking vote, tip workers were the special little target of the IRS's shiny new army of auditors.
According to the Heritage Foundation's Preston Brashers in a February 2023 piece:
It may come as a surprise, then, that the IRS is proposing to direct new scrutiny at underreported tips by waitresses, barbers, and bartenders.
Tipped employees are currently required to pay both federal income taxes and payroll taxes on the tips they receive. Workers report tips to their employers, who pay the 15.3% payroll tax to the IRS on the employee’s behalf and adjust employee wage withholding to account for the taxes workers owe on tips.
To ensure compliance, many employers participate in tip-reporting programs with the IRS.
But now the IRS is attempting to replace existing programs with a more far-reaching and invasive program that would, for example, require employers to use point-of-sale systems to record all sales subject to tipping. Employers in the program would then be required to use these electronically recorded transactions to create detailed annual employee tipping reports for the IRS.
Brashers notes that the IRS and its cheerleaders then secured the funding under false or misleading pretenses that only the rich would be targeted, when in fact, the tip workers were in its gunsights, as well as the gig workers and the small, unincorporated businesses, the little guys who own laundromats or bodegas.
The IRS’ increased scrutiny on tipped workers isn’t a mistake. It’s an attempt to shore up what the agency sees as a significant weakness in its enforcement. The IRS has estimated that 10% of the underreported individual income-tax gap is from tips, even though tipping income accounts for a fraction of a percent of U.S. income.
So the entire controversy over taxes on tips, the unrest and worker unhappiness is the result of Kamala Harris's tie-breaking vote to win passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. It included secret plans to go after the little guy and his tips, even as officials insisted they would be targeting "the rich," and the IRS wouldn't be auditing little guys. But as Brashing points out, it was all bait-and-switch -- the IRS demanded a centralized tip-reporting system and threatened the restaurant and other business establishments with "compliance reviews" which are the same as audits, but with a different title, if they didn't comply with that. They did this to avoid bad public relations about the targeting of tips which was their plan all along.
And this was what Kamala Harris was all in for, a bait-and-switch, to get what she wanted, targeting the little guy for more money.
That is what the tipped workers are upset about, and that is why Trump proposed relief for them.
Now Kamala is proposing relief too, except that she's the one who caused the auditing and surveillance of tipped workers in the first place.
She always was one to get nasty with the little guy, the powerless ones, the guys who can't do much to defend themselves. She did it with petty marijuana offenders when as California attorney general, she kept them imprisoned beyond their terms in order to use their labor to fight wildfires, which Tulsi Gabbard deftly exposed in 2020, and she did it again with the tax bait-and-switch, targeting low-level tipped workers for fresh IRS scrutiny and harvestings.
She's a mean person with a repellent record of hitting the little guy, the easiest guy to target, over and over again. Note that it's now been revealed that Gabbard was subject to Harris-Biden harassment in retaliation for her exposure of Kamala's record.
Harris is mean and vindictive. You can bet that if she gets power, she'll pull a similar bait-and-switch on tipped workers if she wins office, based on her pattern.
That's why she'd be a horrible president. While laughing with the leftists at her rallies, and drawing fawning media coverage, and claims of joy, she's nothing but a sleazy bully looking for new ways to harass the powerless. She'll come after all of us if, God forbid, she ever gets power, because that's what hardcore socialists do. She is one of them, a predator looking for more prey to ruin for the sake of her own power.
Image: Screen shot from Fox4 video, via YouTube