300k before your tips start to become taxable??

What in the world is driving this very high ceiling?

The problem stems less from how it might have originated and more from what it results in.

Multiple times I've been travelling for dinner with coworkers and someone notes "oh, tip is already included here" (be it the group size, the way the place works normally, or whatever reason) and then half the table starts redoing the receipt because they were tricked into it. This example highlights it's not always about intent, work already has a set policy of how to tip (i.e. no generosity or etc involved), people are just getting plain tricked into doing something else instead. Regardless - it's successful in the growth of tips, so it spreads.

Similarly, "just click skip and move on" puts the friction in the wrong direction, especially if you're not alone. It's great that it can apply a lot of the time, but the problem is it has friction, sometimes strong, in certain scenarios. This, again, is successful and so results in the growth of tips.

Lastly, the vast majority of people have some level of desire to be fair even if they don't want to be generous. Any uncertainty which can be created in the tipping process ("am I supposed to tip here?", "is tip in the service charge, if so how much goes to the person and how much were they expecting to get?", "is the recommended tip on the receipt more than I expected", and so on) tends to push people to tip more than their generosity alone would have inclined, and it's really quite unfair to say the solution is to just click skip and hope all will understand.

Unfortunately, there is pretty much nothing pushing in the opposite direction. Your options as an individual, or even sizable portion of society, are to shit on the wait staff's income about it in hopes they complain enough that management gives them more money. Everything about this has the exact opposite incentive pressures as the above, and so whether particularly generous folks are a factor or not... there's really nothing that's going to get done about it.

Maybe we can start some place in the middle of being able to walk into a place and understand what the cost will be up front, like including tax in the base prices of things, and it'll open more doors about tipping for the same consideration. Until then, we all are stuck with dealing with it.

With a small amount of sadness, this is the conclusion I'm starting to end up with. Yes I think waitresses and service workers should make more money. But tipping in the US has become opaque, expanding everywhere, and the expectations around tipping seem to be getting ratcheted up constantly. A business is not viable if customers have to pay your employees separately. I'm close to hitting the nuclear button and just defaulting to zero.

> the top 1% still pay 40+% of federal taxes

No. They pay 40% of Federal income tax, specifically.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fact-check-richest-1...

> The bottom 50% pay no taxes

Same mistake here. They pay plenty of payroll etc. tax.

> The bottom 50% pay no taxes and the top 1% still pay 40+% of federal taxes.

This tells us nothing unless we know how their relative income shares. If the bottom 50% earns only 20% of all income (just an example) this is quite fair. If they earn 60%, it's unfair.

The number of people who just trot out this statistic without context is quite tiresome.

And of course everyone pays sales tax, property tax (even if they're a renter), payroll tax and so on.

> That deduction was worth $100K to a $1M/year income in a 10% State income tax state earner.

What? Income deductions are only worth the marginal tax rate on that income -- ~40% on $100k of income deducted is worth ~$40k. (With the $10k SALT cap, he can still deduct $10k, worth about $4k.) The top bracket being reduced from 40% to 37%, and starting at a higher income threshold, likely saved the same high earner more than $36k.

The Z in Nazi is for "sozialistische" === socialist

Fascism is a brand of socialism that focuses on a hierarchical unified society for a narrow ethnic group.

The right in America is moving away from individualism to a more collectivist movement based on a set of beliefs which are mostly these days based on the opposite of what the left likes mixed with a version of Christianity that is increasingly disconnected from any of the actual gospel teachings.

The left... doesn't seem to believe in anything besides a collection of social issues favored by bored suburban teenagers wishing to be allies of other people (lacking their own problems these bored teenagers gain social standing from how much they appear to fight for other people's causes not having significant problems themselves). I don't know what the Democrats want except for me to be scared of Republicans.

There's a spectrum from individualism to collectivism and outside the extremes of both there's good people and bad people and a lot of room for "taste" instead of "right vs. wrong".

The right is implementing socialist policies and wants you to worship the leadership (which is always right and can do no wrong, by definition).

Zoomed out there's not a lot of difference between fascism and communism (as actually enacted in the real world).

And? He's not a caricature of the far left?

Simplifies tax collection process ≠ Simplifies tax code

A few lines of tax code means millions of people don't have to worry about unpredictable withholdings due to significant changes in tips from day to day, month to month, and year to year.

Also, what's sloppy about it? It's just a deduction for up to a maximum amount from tips, for a specified list of occupations, with the maximum decreasing as income increases above a specified level. That's pretty simple, as far as tax code goes. What do you think would be a less sloppy way of implementing it?

I think ultimately very few people really care about simplifying the tax code. The cost of a complex tax code is the $19.95-$200 cost of preparing your taxes, which everyone would gladly eat if it meant they could take advantage of tax deductions on pages 1,455, 19,210 and 245,908 of the tax code totaling > the cost of tax prep.

I've found outside the USA they tend to be confused when I tip. Or they will look me right in the eyes and say, "American, yes?".

In 14 days, you hit the cap. In 75 days, you start to hit the phase out band.

Nothing wrong with giving money to your kids in general. That income has already been taxed. If they were paying the kids for pretend work and taking a deduction for the higher-income parents, that'd be different.

I've seen that same figure for YT ad revenue alone. sponsorships can range from $0.015-0.030 per video for channels with 1k to 50k subscribers.

at a biweekly cadence, they'd need ~6M views per video to hit $150k with ads alone. if you figure another $0.025 per view for sponsorships, then they would need 6M views per year or about 240K per video.

looking at Patreon stats, it seems reasonable to assume that a channel with 25K subscribers could pull in about 1K Patreon subs with effort. if each is paying $5/mo, then that would add another $60K/yr in revenue (though I imagine a lot of that would get eaten up by fees and extra costs.

If you look at tax brackets plus the standard deduction lowering the bracket it affects, it will be a flat or regressive change in take home income amongst the cohort until at $90K or maybe a bit more, double median income, where you can start writing off against the 22% bracket. Assuming 50% tips.

The employers already had all kinds of bizarre tricks to keep tipped workers down.

My girlfriend works for a local chain restaurant. Some of the things she tells me about seem like they shouldn’t be legal (forcing everyone’s cash tips to be pooled with non tipped teenagers they don’t want to pay, for example. Pretty sure the company has had previous class actions against them. This was just a small local chain in a middle/upper middle class suburb.

I saw a post on Nextdoor the other day where another restaurant closed, laying off the workers without paying them for hours worked. The general consensus about how to get the money you worked for: you don’t. The state has no labor board and there was little option for recourse.

Towards what? No taxes at all? That's not desirable if you want things like public schools and rule of law.

And if you want more progressive taxation, then support more progressive taxation. Treating classes of workers differently is not a way to get to more equitable progressive taxation.

>Why aren’t capital gains taxed at a higher rate than income?

The federal capital gains rates are higher than the effective tax rates paid by a family making a median income, but I suspect you are asking why the capital gains rates are not higher than the highest marginal rates.

One issue is simply that capital gains tax rates generally don't account for inflation. If you build a business over a few decades and sell it, much of the increase in value will be simply due to inflation. Do you want to encourage long term investment, or make it so only financially illiterate people do long term investments?

Because rich people earn more from capital gains than income?

No, you're renting the physical space -- a scarce part of the commons -- from your community.

(I do think property taxes should be a land-value tax and not include improvements you've built.)

Places like that exist. You should try living there, see how you like the quality of life.