If there’s a lesson to be learned from Kamala Harris attempting to appropriate Donald Trump’s idea for abolishing taxes on tips, it’s this: Run on what you want to see done.
Eliminating taxes on tips is a highly debatable as policy. On the upside, it’s always better to give people tax relief that incentivizes them to work more, rather than giving them handouts. It also eliminates taxes on a kind of income that is administratively hardly worth the cost of enforcement. It puts citizens who work for tips on an equal basis with illegal immigrants who collect tips and don’t file income tax returns. And it restores the de facto status quo: tips traditionally went underreported because they were in cash, which has been undermined as more people shifted to paying bills (and the tips that come with them) electronically. On the downside, it treats some income and some workers unequally, it adds further exploitable loopholes to the tax code, it could incentivize employers to cut wages in favor of tips, and it’s less economically beneficial than other forms of tax relief that could be crowded out by the “cost” to the government in foregone tax revenue from ending the tip-tax. One could tell an even more skeptical story about Trump’s proposal to remove taxes on Social Security benefits. This is before you even get into questions about how Harris is using the cover of a me-too proposal to smuggle in different things than what is in Trump’s proposal.
The important thing is this: None of this is a priority to Republicans, conservatives, or Trump. It’s just a campaign pander. Nobody involved, if they found themselves setting policy without an eye on the electorate, would consider the tip-tax cut a priority. Which is exactly why Harris stealing Trump’s idea leaves him without a political leg to stand on other than whining about her copying him.
When you run on the things you actually want to see happen, it’s a good thing if your opponents copy your ideas. Sure, you can press them on the sincerity of their opportunistic conversion (such as John McCain saying he wanted to “build the danged fence”), but that, too, is a way of trying to box them in to actually do it. It was a good thing for conservatives when they actually got Bill Clinton to sign a bunch of stuff like tax cuts, welfare reform, border enforcement, and the Defense of Marriage Act. It was a good thing for liberals when George W. Bush adopted the Clinton–Gore idea of a new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs and passed it into law – even if the precise structure of that entitlement wasn’t what liberals wanted. When the other side is copying your rhetoric and your proposals, you’re winning.
But this isn’t winning. Trump is mad now because the point of the tip-tax cut isn’t to accomplish a policy priority, it’s to get Donald Trump elected. If it instead gets Kamala Harris elected, what’s the use in that?