Millions upon millions of young adults have worked in the food service industry. Being a waiter or waitress can teach someone a number of useful life skills. Many develop such a strong affinity for the job that they decide to make it their career. However, most in the food service industry are young people, or people who, financially, must secure additional employment.
A lot of waiters and waitresses pick up a server job to “make ends meet.” But anyone who’s worked as a server appreciates how challenging the job can be. One of the biggest issues is the economic challenges. Restaurants are permitted to pay their servers “less than the minimum wage.” That’s because customers leave a tip according to the server’s performance.
Sure, there’s an “understood percentage for gratuity” that most people adhere to, but that still doesn’t change the facts. Waiters and waitresses invariably survive on their tips. Often, they barely make the arduous job of waiting tables worth the time and effort. Typically, these aren’t Americans trying to cheat on their taxes.
But that’s not what Joe Biden thinks. Biden claims his push to hire 87,000 new IRS agents was to target tax abuse by the wealthiest Americans. It’s not. You can bet that these newly hired tax guns won’t be knocking on the doors of wealthy Democrat donors. This has been a sham to target hardworking Americans from the very outset.
House Republicans, led by new Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have vowed to shut down Biden’s IRS henchmen before they even get started. The House passed legislation to repeal funding for Biden’s band of tax hounds. But that isn’t stopping Biden from pushing policies that would target the most financially vulnerable in the U.S. workforce.
The Biden administration has instructed the IRS to formulate a new “tip reporting compliance” procedure. The IRS statement claims this isn’t a new set of policies to target servers. But like most statements from government officials, it’s purposefully ambiguous. An IRS official said, “This proposal is not in effect and is intended to welcome further conversation from all interested parties before any rule is put into place.”
In summary, that usually means that D.C. bureaucrats are going to act as if they’re engaging in a conversation about a policy, but soon the policy will be enacted. It makes no difference what “the people” think. One feature clearly shows the reasoning behind this push to target servers. It reads: “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer's point-of-sale system.”
In other words, Joe Biden is ordering the IRS to dog waiters and waitresses over the tips that many rely on just to survive. Mike Palicz is federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform. Palicz sees through this charade. He notes, “There's no reason they'd be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary.”
Palicz continues by noting that Biden said that no one making less than $400,000 a year will be the target of his new IRS agenda. We’re not sure, but the list of wait staff making over $400,000 a year, including tips, is probably a pretty small number. This is a joke. Biden’s new IRS plan to target waiters and waitresses is another “big brother power grab.”
But when the Republican-controlled House voted to yank $70 billion from Biden’s $80 billion fund to beef up the IRS, any new agents may have to work like waiters and waitresses. We wonder how many of these Biden tax hounds will go ahead and harass hardworking Americans if the way they get paid will be from tips or generous gratuities from the White House?