Is tipping compatible with democracy? When it first spread across the United States in the late 19th century, many people thought it was not. According to the journalist Nina Martyris, the Progressive Era spawned an anti-tipping movement. Many states banned tipping, three of them in 1915. (The laws all proved unenforceable and eventually were repealed.) When William Howard Taft ran for president in 1908, he was seen as the anti-tipping candidate because he refused to tip his barber. Samuel Gompers called it a “nuisance” that “often borders on blackmail.” The writer William R. Scott, his 1915 manifesto, The Itching Palm, wrote:
In an aristocracy a waiter may accept a tip and be servile without violating the ideals of the system. In the American democracy to be servile is incompatible with citizenship.
Every tip given in the United States is a blow at our experiment in democracy. The custom announces to the world that at heart we are aristocratic, that we do not believe practically that “all men are created equal”; that the class distinctions forbidden by our organic law are instituted through social conventions and flourish in spite of our lofty professions.
Scott further pointed out that tipping enabled employers to pay workers less. “Those who pay minimum, or no, wages,” he wrote, “aggressively exploit the [customer’s] propensity to give.” I’ve written about the immorality of tipping before, but Donald Trump’s new proposal to exempt tips from taxation returns me to this subject.
To the extent that Trump’s tax proposal increases a worker’s take-home pay—and, incidentally, in most cases, it will not, or, if it does, only by a tiny bit—it incentivizes the boss not to increase wages. The Democrats have a better idea: Eliminate the “tipped minimum” wage, which allows employers to pay tipped employees a mere $2.25 per hour (i.e., five dollars less than the already-measly federal hourly minimum). Eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers has the advantage over Trump’s proposal of making business pay for its own labor rather than shifting labor costs onto taxpayers (who at any rate already subsidize the low-wage economy through the Earned Income Tax Credit). I explain all this in my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.