Given the national deficit and debt, is this the time to even mention tax cuts, political rhetoric or not?
Tax-free tip income
No tax on Social Security benefits
No tax increases from current levels
It all sounds good to many people, but that ignores the consequences. How will the lost revenue to Social Security and Medicare be replaced?
Why would we increase the federal deficit by lowering revenue?
Why would we propose to add new social programs, and expand others paid for with new taxes while ignoring the need to deal with the current fiscal issues?
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
I have written the before: inflation is an indirect taxation on everyone. The less well-off will suffer the most! The chart showing the US debt clock components increasing is mind numbing! “The frog has already been cooked in the boiling water and then been transferred to the frying pan to be eventually burned to a crisp”
What it means is this: the purchasing value of our dollars is increasingly being cheapen.
For most people our standard of living is going down…down….down for the count!
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it is always amusing to see that the answer is never reducing spending but taking more money from folks–state income tax–local taxes–property taxes–excise taxes–meal tax–if it moves then tax it–be a bit creative and tell us what programs should be cut.
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You forgot Sleepy Joe forgiving student loans. That adds to the debt!
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Yes it does
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You know the answer on the Democrat side. Corporate tax increases and tax the wealthy. It will start in 2025. How much income you have to have to be wealthy could be surprisingly low. How to tax all the retirement accounts will be require some legal twists but it can be done. There are new programs on the horizon and they need seed money so pay up.
Actually, there are several ideas floating around that make sense. Not taxing tips has merit. It is a gratuity, dependent on the person paying the tip and could be from 0 to whatever. It is not a wage. Another idea, and I know you support taxation of Social Security, is to index the taxation levels that were not indexed way back. It was a bad policy not to include indexing then and it is bad policy to continue it now.
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How do we make up lost revenue? A tip by any name is income and about 40% is not reported now according to the IRS estimates.
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It is income in the sense that somebody gave a server some amount of money. It is not a wage or salary that can be depended on, hence a gratuity, or a donation if you will. If we consider that, then diners should get a deduction for the tips they leave.
If 40% is not being cornered by the IRS, then the other 60% won’t crater the annual tax receipts. The people living on the tips aren’t the higher income groups anyway. I’m not concerned with how to make up the revenue loss. The powers that be don’t give a flip so I don’t lose any sleep worrying about it.
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