President Joe Biden now supports eliminating taxes on tips — though it’s unclear when he arrived at that decision.
“This is something the president supports,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday when asked about the idea. “He supports eliminating taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump first proposed axing taxes for tipped wages during a June 9 rally in service-heavy Nevada. More than two months later, Vice President Kamala Harris followed suit during her own Nevada rally, saying that “it is my promise to everyone here, when I am president … [to] eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
During Monday’s press briefing, reporters asked why Biden and Harris haven’t pursued such a policy during their three-and-a-half years in office and what made them come out in support of it in the last few days.
“This vice president has always had the backs of the working people, always,” Jean-Pierre said. “You see that in the policies that they put forward. Everything that we have put forward, historic pieces of legislation that are now laws, are helping middle-class workers, helping people in different communities that are normally left behind.”
Trump, in a Truth Social post, accused Harris of stealing his idea, predicting she wouldn’t follow through and charging that she has no ideas of her own.
“This was a TRUMP idea — She has no ideas, she can only steal from me. Remember, Kamala has proposed the LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN HISTORY — It won’t happen. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social. Other Republicans made similar points on social media.
When a reporter asked why Biden and Harris, who took office in January 2021, didn’t support the policy before, she again pointed to the work they’ve done elsewhere.
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“Again, the president supports eliminating taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she said, adding the administration’s support for raising the minimum wage. “There are things that the president and this vice president have done over three-and-a-half years that have helped hardworking people.”
Harris’s tax-on-tips proposal is one of the few economic policies she has released to date, though she says she will unveil a more complete set of proposals for the economy later this week.
