White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried and failed Monday to claim credit for the “no tax on tips” idea that Vice President Kamala Harris embraced after former President Donald Trump proposed it earlier this summer.
As Breitbart News has reported, Harris copied Trump’s policy of “no tax on tips” — a key point in his speech at the Republican National Convention last month — during a campaign rally on Saturday. As Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said, Harris was the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which provided for 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents — whose responsibilities included collecting taxes on tips from tipped employees.
As VP, Kamala was the deciding vote on the “Inflation Reduction Act” that gave the IRS $80 billion of your tax dollars to make sure they tax every tip workers earn! Kamala Harris is a total fraud! pic.twitter.com/U2mLctNwa9
— Jim Banks (@Jim_Banks) August 11, 2024
But Harris, sensing a policy winner, and hoping to appeal to unionized culinary workers in Las Vegas, Nevada, simply stole Trump’s policy. Jean-Pierre said Monday that President Joe Biden, too, supported the “no tax on tips” policy.
Asked by a reporter when, at any point in three-and-a-half years in office, the Biden-Harris administration had ever adopted a policy of “no tax on tips,” Jean-Pierre flailed about, before finally admitting that it was a “new idea.” She said that Biden and Harris generally supported helping the working class, and claimed that Republicans did not.
The fact that Harris would lift a policy from a so-called “danger to democracy” like Trump also raised eyebrows.
Asked again, later, by another reporter, why the president and vice president had never talked about “no taxes on tips” before, Jean-Pierre said that they had discussed raising the minimum wage, and Republicans had opposed it.
“I don’t have a timeline for you,” she finally said, simply repeating that the president supported “no tax on tips.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.