So I know this was in the budget bill, and just like Trump’s tariffs, things change so much it’s hard to keep up with. But I have a legitimate question for the community here. This is not a troll, but legitimately trying to understand support for this.

No taxes on tips and overtime.. so where to start. A few years ago, Biden tried to pass broad student loan forgiveness. He did manage to get forgiveness for a lot of people who earned it under PSLF, as well as some folks who got scammed. But the biggest one, the $10/20k one was blocked. One of the biggest arguments I heard from people was either “I didn’t go to school, why should my tax dollars pay” or similarly “I worked my way through college and paid it off myself, you should do the same” (although some of these people undoubtedly went to college when it was $500/semester and not $5000).

Honestly if that’s the logic we want to use, it could follow similarly for this OT/Tips bill.

For tips.. that’s one entire segment of the work force that gets away from taxes entirely. Waitresses/Servers will basically just have entirely tax free income. Now some may say “serving isn’t that high paying of a job” but I beg to differ. I’ve known a lot of them and seen them make $200-300 in a 5 hour shift. I imagine some in some high scale places make even more. In fact, probably 12-14 years ago I asked a few of them if they would rather keep tips or get a flat $20 per hour (what I made at the time). Every single one of them said tips. Keep in mind, well over a decade ago, so pre-Covid inflation, at a small town Ruby Tuesday.

Now for overtime.. as a skilled salary worker, my kind got screwed over by Republicans blocking the loan forgiveness. Then, when it came to IT specifically, they again blocked Biden trying to reform OT rules so that skilled salary workers like myself would no longer be exempt. For example, in IT, you may not have a single direct report. You work on projects, you troubleshoot, you build. Really, we are not that different from other skilled workers like nurses or trades people. But for some reason, so many of us are marked exempt. Considering on-call and disaster recovery situations, there is the potential for loads of “free” work.

So we can’t even get OT, but everyone else would now have zero taxes on 1.5x-2x pay? How’s that fair or even make sense?
I could understand reporting OT income into a marked separate bucket, and at the end of the year having it taxed at your normal rate even if it pushed you into a new bracket, but NO tax at all?

So now I’m going to use the same argument that everyone used when things would have helped me. Why? Why should I have to pay more tax than you? Why should my tax dollars have to go further? Who’s going to cover this sudden massive loss of tax revenue? The tariffs? I thought the tariffs were a “negotiating tool” and that if all goes as planned, there won’t be any tariffs in the end?