You would think the rapidly escalating insurance cost would be a warning that Florida is not good or safe place to live. If your home is built on shifting sand, threatened by rising seas, and virtually guaranteed to be regularly battered by violent storms perhaps you should move before it completely depreciated. Floridians better hope Aquaman has a big checkbook.
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For the record: An official from the Harris campaign said the policy would include “strict requirements to prevent hedge fund managers and lawyers from structuring their compensation in ways to try to take advantage of the policy.”
I’m sure they want to do that, but it will fail and be abused just like independent contract work, civil forfeiture, and everything else that has an intended specific use case that gets changed over time to be abused by the powerful. This approach will make it so anyone can claim a monetary exchange was a tip and put the burden on the government to prove it wasn’t, which is just ripe for abuse the moment it becomes law.
Tips as someone’s base income is a cancer on society. Just make companies pay living wages instead.
I’m pretty sure the Harris suggestion requires you are specifically working as a waiter and a few other specific job descriptions.
So the possibility for abuse by “the powerful” does not seem possible to do legally.
People can always cheat illegally, which can work for years, but there’s a risk to be found out.
Personally I’m against making tips tax free, because it seems to be a bad solution to a problem of low wages in service industries.
But on the other hand, if it’s not politically possible with a better solution, I guess it’s better than nothing.
I’d like to see a multi-phase federal plan with the clearly stated ultimate goal to phase out tips. This plan should have clearly defined beginning, milestones, and end so that workers and businesses could plan around it and everyone would be on the same-ish page or at least know what’s going on.
Stop taxing tips on specific jobs/industries combined with bringing up the minimum wage for all workers to standard (no $2.50/hr wage for tipped waiters, etc).
Start an educational program that talks about the history and effects of tipping culture and why this program is good to try to stop it
Start a government program that encourages reduced tipping, promoting specific percentages (e.g. 10% for restaurant table service) to consciously try to move the culture, this should go along with an increase in minimum wage that effectively makes up for the reduced tip. Repeat this step if needed to slowly step-down from tipping culture into one based on labor appropriately compensated by the employers.
This will help people know what to expect on both sides of transactions
This can reduce negative feelings associated with not giving a large tip because you know this is all part of a plan and the employer is expected be following the law and increasing compensation.
This will provide cover for business to increase their prices accordingly, and simultaneously the government can put out guidance about how much prices should be expected to rise and how your total bill won’t really change much.
The end goals should be clearly stated, something like
A person working 40 hours/wk at minimum wage should be able to afford a basic, clean, up-to-standard 1-bedroom apartment, food, and transport, and basic medical care.
Hopefully, culturally, tipping changes to be seen as like " ‘the old way’, weird old people like paying service workers to feel superior".
Not sure Rick.
Why would anyone’s wages won’t be subject to taxation while others are?
How can we prevent executives from instating “executive tips” that are not taxable ?
Is this a true effort to not get the people in service positions to get full salary and benefits?
I’m leaning towards horrible. If your tips are tax-free, I’m gonna cut your wages. What do you care? Go out there and make more tips! Shake that money maker, honey!
And why should waitresses and bar staff have all the luck? Doesn’t everyone deserve tax-free tips? Tip your grocery cashier! Tip your nurse! Tip the guy at the bank who approves the loan you need to afford giving tips to everyone, as the weight of providing a living to everyone you interact with shifts away from the business owners and shareholders and onto your shoulders!
If a hospital in the US started paying their nurses the same minimum wage that a server gets, that hospital would suddenly be without nurses and it would be entirely the hospital’s fault.
They won’t drop them to $2.50/hr or whatever the ridiculousness currently is, they’ll just not give them any raises or start them at $10k lower than the non-tipped hospital. And the nurses will do the math and decide is still works out for them because the tips make up for it. The end result being the business pays less for their employees and the customer pays more.
What makes you think people will go from tipping $10 on a $40-50 meal, to tipping, say, $100 on a $400-500 medical bill? Or $1,000 on a $4,000-5,000 one? Or even more? Do you think that insurance is going to cover tips for nurses? Do you think every nurse in a given hospital is going to stay there instead of getting a job somewhere else that doesn’t expect them to take tips, especially when they realize that nobody is tipping them?
What makes you think they won’t? How much is it worth you when you’re feeling miserable to have a nurse that checks on you every 10 minutes instead of every hour? How much gratitude do you have for personal attention when you need help rather than just carrying food to a table?
And like all places that transition to tips, they probably won’t just say “we take tips now, -$10k”, they’ll first add it as an option for “an extra thank you” that then becomes factored into the salaries they offer to new nurses and the raises they give to existing employees.
See, there’s a crucial difference in the two professions. A server is someone who brings your food, takes your check, and generally doesn’t do much else. A nurse, on the other hand, needs to balance the life-saving care of dozens of patients at once while dealing with administrative bullcrap the whole time. People tip servers well to incentivize them to spend less time on their phones and dropping plates, and more time carrying food and recording orders accurately. You can’t do that with nurses because they can’t possibly give any more of their time. 91% of nurses experienced high levels of burnout in 2023,, and I’m dead certain that a lot of that is the insane workload. Twelve hour shifts working with uncaring staff and pissed-off patients must be soul-crushing. Then for your employer to try and disguise your looming pay cuts as “a way to give your healthcare heroes a special thank you” would probably cause an exodus from the profession; people can see through that stuff pretty easily.
You’re still assuming this is going to be an immediate industry-wide thing, too. Like I said, people will see through the corporate bs, and they’ll learn at some point that they can go to another hospital, not be expected to beg for tips from their suffering patients, and get paid more than the place that was lowballing them. Word of mouth is powerful. There’s an entire cottage industry of Canadian nurses who cross the border into America for work because they’re so dissatisfied with the Canadian system. Your scenario only works in a setting where there is only one nationwide hospital system that decides the market rate for nursing, and that people wouldn’t decide not to become nurses after seeing that they’re expected to tip them. We already see a nursing shortage because they’re being treated so poorly; trying to make it a tipped industry would only make it worse.
As for the “would you?” thing, I can speak from a degree of personal experience here. I was in the psych ward in May and I was waiting for over ten hours in there to see a psychiatrist. I was tired, hungry, bored, and scared of what might happen to me. I was in no way equipped to make financial decisions at that point, and I get the feeling that the medical field would consider taking tips from someone who was in such an emotionally frail state to be unethical at best. (Oh yeah, and they took away my wallet. Couldn’t give them cash if I wanted to.) My insurance made the cost of going there “reasonable,” (mostly because I wasn’t actually admitted,) but if the hospital expected me to tip the staff there, it would be nonsensical. How would you determine what the tip should be based on? The pre-insurance amount? That’s like $5,000 there if I’m lucky, and 20% of that is $1,000 on a bill I only paid like $275 for. One word: No. The post-insurance amount? That’s $27.50. A pittance compared to how much time and effort went into taking care of me, including the time it took to become a nurse to begin with. Furthermore, I would be so removed from the process of sending the tip that by the time the money reached the nurse(s) who helped me, they would only know me as a name on a bill at best. And again, would insurance be willing to cover the cost of a tip?
Servers work their backsides off. Firstly, those trays are backbreaking, then they fill condiments, wrap silver, if they're not finished with that by the time customers leave their tables, and they can't fill condiments while customers are at the table. Sweetener packets must all be turned the same way. Tables must be sanitized, windows cleaned, the floors swept or vacuumed or mopped, often sanitized. Who do you think cleans and sanitizes the bathrooms? Helps get the kitchen staff caught up?
They do, but the fact remains that you can’t effectively incentivize people to work more for you personally when they’re already soul-crushingly overworked doing things for everyone else in their rotation. Trying to get more out of nurses who are in the industry already would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Also, you don’t go to college for several years to be a server. If people realize they’re going to have to beg for tips from their patients, then that won’t bode well for the profession.
Conservatives want GENITAL INSPECTORS at School to be SURE your Daughter or Son is using the Right bathroom but also people who have Vaginas ARENT Female so why have Genital Inspectors again?
The number of people on the right who think the left are the child molestors is at least 23%. They literally think we’re Santanist worshiping pedophiles. The number of which are projecting their own pedophilia tendencies is non-zero.
I’d wager at least half of the pizza gate pushers/believers are people that at least have CSAM on their computers, if not actively harming children in their circle.
no but see its fine when they do it. raping children isn’t pedophilia, only consenting adults having their bodies do things I don’t like is pedophilia.
I have mixed feelings on this. I grew up in a secular setting as my father had long ago given up on religion and my mother seemed ambivalent about it.
As an adult, I moved to a new city with my wife who is religious, though non-evangelical. She never tried to push me into it but would disappear every Sunday morning. But after a decade or so of feeling like a stranger in my adopted city, I attended a service where I discovered they were in desperate need for musicians. So I wound up volunteering some time and in the process, met a lot of people, and one thing led to another. Today, I do have friends in the city, play in various bands around town, etc.
Yet I still haven’t really bought into religion. I guess the value to me is that it gets my introverted ass out of the house and meeting people irl. As a community institution, it brings together people of varying ages and demographics. But it comes with a huge amount of baggage which I could frankly do without?
I just hope that if religion fades away, there will still be something at the community level that gathers together people regularly from all walks of life. There are all sorts of special interest groups, but many of these do not necessarily attract a wide cross-section of society.
Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?
Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?
There’s one church a few blocks away from here that went out of business a few years ago and is now being used as a homeless shelter by an area non-profit. I walk by it all the time and have seen the before/after. The property is finally being put to a use that helps humanity and the the neighborhood is much better off for it.
There shouldn’t be “relatively affordable housing on Florida’s coastline.” That ship has sailed. The state is going to flood and get battered by hurricanes until it’s completely subsumed by the ocean. They’ve had half a century to get their shit together and reverse global warming. Florida should no longer qualify for any other federal aid. Surrender that shit to Poseidon.
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They were alerted that this would be an issue and they went forward with no exceptions anyway. Might want to have some interviews with the children of Republican legislators in Idaho…
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