Trump’s Latest Campaign Demagoguery: No Tax on Tips
Plus: Taking a breath before the debate.
Strap in, folks: It’s debate day. Two old guys step into a CNN studio in Atlanta tonight—an unpopular incumbent trying to shake up the race, and his apparently (!) slightly less unpopular (!!) predecessor trying to slam the door.
Sounds like a stressful time! So why not watch with some good friends? Bulwark+ members can tune in to our livestream of the debate at 8:50 p.m. Eastern to hang in our chatroom as the thing unfolds, while Egger, Mona Charen, and JVL will hop in for live commentary during commercial breaks. When it’s over, Bill and A.B. Stoddard will join for postgame analysis.
Members will get an email with information on how to access the stream this afternoon. (If you’re not a member, it’s not a bad time to climb aboard—you can take the next 30 days to try us out for free. )
Hope we’ll see you there! Happy Thursday.
No Tax on Tips?
Donald Trump’s economic campaign pitch generally runs to broad strokes—I built an amazing economy, Joe Biden ruined it, I alone can fix it again. In recent days, though, he’s been running the opposite way with a concrete, crunchy piece of messaging: No tax on tips.
Here he was yesterday, calling into a roundtable discussion with black business owners at an Atlanta barbershop, regaling them with a story about a waitress he (supposedly) talked to recently at his Las Vegas hotel:
She said, “Oh, the government is after me all the time for my tax on tips.” I said, “Really, they do that?” She said, “Yeah, Biden just made the regulations much tougher.” It’s very tough nowadays, tax on tips . . .
The people are very unhappy about what’s happening, especially the new regulations. And anyway, I just came up with the concept of no tax on tips—let the people earn what they earn. And it has been so popular, beyond anything—I’ve never seen anything like it. So we have no tax on tips. Vote for Trump, no tax on tips.
As a policy matter, this is completely ridiculous. However you feel about America’s idiosyncratic norms around tipping, the idea that a random subset of the hospitality and service sector—bartenders and restaurant servers, mostly—should suddenly get to pay essentially zero tax on their income is incoherent. If you want to lower taxes on lower earners, why not lower taxes on all lower earners?
But while we hate to hand it to the guy: “No tax on tips” works great as a piece of campaign demagoguery. It codes as pro-working class, and specifically solicitous of a part of the working class that pretty much everyone interacts with: You get more political juice out of a policy favoring servers than you would out of one favoring, say, meatpackers. It also functions as a guerrilla campaigning tool, with Trump urging his supporters to write “vote for Trump, no tax on tips” on their restaurant receipts.
There’s even a stab at Biden in there—“Biden just made the regulations much tougher”—which, as far as we can tell, its completely off-base. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a question about what policy Trump was referring to; the IRS last year proposed a new tip reporting program to combine and streamline three previously separate tip-tracking programs.)
One nice thing about Republicans used to be that they had a bit of an allergy to economic policy by meme. Not so much now: The second Trump started talking about “No tax on tips,” GOP lawmakers rushed to put it into action. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced legislation to exempt cash tips from taxation last week, in a move cosponsored by Sens. Steve Daines, Kevin Cramer, and Tim Scott.
Meanwhile, Team Biden, likely sensing the political power of the pitch, has been relatively furtive in response. In a campaign memo sent ahead of the debate, Biden spokespeople James Singer and Sarafina Chitika attacked not the policy idea itself, but the idea that Trump would follow through on it.
“Important Trump lie to look out for: Trump supports no taxes on tips and is a supporter of workers,” they wrote. “This is false, Trump cannot be trusted.”
—Andrew Egger
The Calm Before the Storm
I woke up this morning and took a look at the latest polls.
A new New York Times/Siena survey has Trump with a narrow lead.
Quinnipiac asked: “If there were a crisis that put the country at great risk, who would you want in the Oval Office to deal with it: Donald Trump or Joe Biden?” 51 percent of registered voters prefer Trump, 43 percent Biden.
The Washington Post and the Schar School at George Mason found that voters in swing states were concerned about threats to democracy—and that Trump is more trusted than Biden to protect democracy.
Wait, wait, wait . . . What am I doing? Why am I obsessing about this? There’s a debate tonight. It will change things—for better or worse. Or it might change very little. In any case, there’ll be plenty of time to ponder all of this afterwards.
Shouldn’t we in the meantime put this aside for a few hours?
Yes. Put the debate out of mind. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
So my advice is, until 9:00 pm ET tonight, take a break. Read an old Donald Westlake novel. Watch an episode of Vera on Amazon Prime. Go to your kids’ or grandkids’ little league game or swim meet. Watch highlights of the Mets’ victories the last two nights over the Yankees. Clean out the garage. Read the new Supreme Court decisions. Check out 2025 golden visa possibilities in Greece.
But then, I suppose, we really should watch the debate. If you’re a Bulwark+ member, you can watch on our livestream with commentary in real time by Mona Charen, Andrew Egger, and JVL. And/or you can tune in at 11:00 pm for JVL, A.B. Stoddard and me for an attempt at a wrap-up and evaluation.
Tomorrow morning the sun will rise in the east. It will be a hot summer day. The debate will be history. We can discuss its results and implications. And we can go back to obsessing.
—William Kristol
Quick Hits
1. Trump vs. the Ten Commandments
Up at the site, Mona Charen ponders Louisiana’s new law requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments:
For the first time since Reconstruction, Louisiana has a Republican governor and Republican supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Every major elected office in the state government is held by a Republican. In 2020, the state went for Trump over Biden by more than 18 points. This is MAGA land. The Ten Commandments law follows a series of other Trump-inspired measures in Baton Rouge like permitting state law enforcement officers to arrest and jail suspected migrants, allowing permitless carry for guns, and classifying abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances.
This Ten Commandments law is a chin-scratcher, though. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a big fan of the Decalogue. But I thought the MAGA view was that, at a time like this, with liberals and progressives about to destroy the USA, we can’t afford the luxury of morality. Isn’t that what evangelicals who’ve embraced Trump and all his works tell themselves?
2. The problem of pain
“Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals,” Elizabeth Rosenthal writes in The Atlantic: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”
The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates back to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain—primarily with opioids—was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding that they can (and should) think about treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.
About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche speciality: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs—blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate—pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution. . .
This approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctor’s discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3 to 19 percent of people who get a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.
3. Prepping for ‘the big one’
Not to get too Atlantic-happy here, but we knew a lot less about all the earthquake-proofing California’s done over the last 30 years—and the challenges facing those scientists who want to get even better at early quake detection—before we read this fascinating piece by Ross Andersen:
At the turn of the 20th century, California was home to only a few seismographs, primarily inside domed observatories atop mountain peaks, where they made use of ultraprecise astronomers’ clocks. But after the United States and the Soviet Union agreed in 1963 to stop testing nukes aboveground, the Pentagon suddenly became very keen on funding new seismic sensors. Scientists have since spread more than 1,000 of them across California’s surface, in both big cities and wilderness areas. They pick up a lot of noise. East of Los Angeles, in the San Bernardino Mountains, they detect the clatter of rockfall. At construction sites downtown, they register the rumble of semitrucks and jackhammer pounding.
Algorithms sift through this noise at real-time data-analysis centers, searching for P-waves—the fast-moving ripples of seismic energy that first rush outward from a fault slip. These waves are a gentle announcement of the more ruinous S waves to come. When enough of them are detected, automated processes are set into motion. Millions of push alerts pop up on mobile-phone lock screens. Stop lights redden, and gas valves shut down. Metro cars pause instead of entering tunnels. “The speed of telecommunications is faster than seismic waves,” Beroza told me. “You only have seconds, but that’s enough time to get out ahead of the shaking.” . . .
“Everything we do now is remote sensing,” Beroza told me. If we want clearer glimpses at earthquakes—and the potentially predictive seismic activity that precedes them—we have to place sensors underneath this top layer of crust. Japan’s seismic network is the envy of the world, in part because its scientists have wedged their sensors deeper into the planet. After the Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,000 people in 1995, the country’s political leaders encouraged data-sharing among seismologists and funded the drilling of boreholes all across the archipelago. Each one runs a few hundred feet deep.
It’s a good start. At that depth, the sensors encounter much less noise. But seismic waves are still distorted and weakened when they arrive at Japan’s borehole sensors. Ideally, they would be placed miles and miles down, where the quakes originate, but that part of the interior is as inaccessible as outer space, Beroza told me. Even putting the equipment a mile down would be very expensive. Any borehole that deep would be in constant danger of closing in on itself, given the extreme pressure. It might also fill up with corrosive liquids and gases. Still, this kind of drilling has been done in a few one-off projects. If it were successful, sensors could be lowered beneath the crust’s uppermost layer, and they’d be able to record aspects of an earthquake that can’t be observed at the surface.
Cheap Shots
I was a server for 15 years, and I would pay a 50% tax on my tips before I would vote for Trump.
The key to understanding how tonight's debate will be "scored" by the general public, and probably much of the media as well:
1) Anything Joe Biden says can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion.
2) Whatever Donald Trump says will be classified as simply Donald being Donald.
If you can accept that inequity, feel free to watch without pulling all of your (remaining) hair out. If not, better to indulge a hobby interest, play with your pet(s), or otherwise engage in some sort of stress-reducing activity. I will watch, as part of my ongoing attempt to say that I am informed and up-to-date, but reserve the right to switch to an episode of The Rockford Files if it becomes as ugly as many predict. Even being informed has its limits.