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taxes
This Tax Season Proved 'No Tax on Tips' Was Never for Workers
Cutting taxes on some tips for some workers is not a solution. Raising wages—and ending the subminimum wage—is.
Apr 18, 2026
During the election, Donald Trump boasted about lowering taxes for working Americans with his “no tax on tips” plan. This tax season, millions of Americans found out it was a scam.
You have to earn money for tax cuts to affect you. A tax deduction only helps if you owe taxes—and most tipped workers earn so little that they barely do. Two-thirds of tipped workers will not even earn enough to benefit. Zero minus zero is still zero. The vast majority of these tax cuts go to the wealthiest taxpayers.
For the workers this policy was supposed to help, the results are already clear.
Take Sherie Cummings, who has poured drinks on the Las Vegas Strip for 20 years. Sherie and her husband, also a bartender, earned $60,000 in tips last year. They expected the full deduction the president promised. They got $25,000 of it. The cap.
Thirteen million tipped workers do not need a tax deduction. They need a raise.
For private jet buyers, the same law delivered something different. Full write-offs on aircraft worth $5 to $10 million. And that write-off is permanent. The tips deduction expires in 2028. The Tax Policy Center projects that 60% of the savings from this law will flow to the top fifth of households—those earning more than $217,000 a year. The wealthiest will save millions. Sherie Cummings is putting her refund into savings because she is afraid of what comes next.
For working people, the real problem was never the tax code. It is wages. The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 an hour since 1991. It was locked there permanently in 1996 by the National Restaurant Association—what we call “the other NRA.” They spent $2.9 million on federal lobbying in 2020 alone to make sure it stayed there. Which is why tipped workers earn a median income of $15,198 a year. Thirty-seven percent of the national median. Which is why they rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of other workers. And because workers depend on tips from customers to survive, they put up with what no one should have to. Seventy-one percent of women in the industry report sexual harassment. In subminimum wage states, the rate is double what it is in states that require a full minimum wage with tips on top.
Seven states already require a full minimum wage with tips on top: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, Alaska. It is called One Fair Wage. The restaurant lobby warns that tips would disappear, that restaurants would close, that jobs would vanish. These are scare tactics. The seven states prove them wrong. Tips are the same or higher. Restaurant employment grows faster. Small business growth rates match or beat subminimum wage states.
And restaurant workers have organized and fought for years and won One Fair Wage in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Michigan. The restaurant lobby has fought to block and roll back these wins—in Michigan, they are still trying. But workers keep going. And even where implementation is partial, the numbers are in. DC set an all-time restaurant employment record. Tips grew. Chicago saw more than 850 new restaurant licenses and the fastest pay growth in the country.
Cutting taxes on some tips for some workers is not a solution. Raising wages—and ending the subminimum wage—is. That is why more than 100 labor, community, and civil rights organizations have come together as the Living Wage For All coalition. The fight: Raise the minimum wage to meet the cost of living and end all subminimum wages. In every state. For every worker. Campaigns are active in eight states. Workers have already won. And they will keep winning.
Thirteen million tipped workers do not need a tax deduction. They need a raise. Every shift. Every paycheck. Every year.
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America Needs To Tax Its Own 'Second Estate': Billionaires
The United States has no nobility, according to our Constitution. But our tax code does protect the very rich.
Dec 04, 2025
Pre-revolutionary French aristocrats—the “Second Estate”—didn’t pay taxes. Amazingly, America too has a second estate, billionaires who pay virtually no taxes. In her very outstanding recent book, law professor Ray D. Madoff shows how they get away with this.
The United States has no nobility, according to our Constitution. But our tax code does protect the very rich.
Federal taxes on income and estates—intended to fund government and prevent development of a hereditary financial aristocracy—were enacted early in the 20th century and originally worked well.
But since about 1980, the estate tax—infested with loopholes—has been nearly abolished for practical purposes and now produces trivial income.
Madoff wants to get rid of the ability of ultra-rich people—billionaires—to avoid having any taxable income in the first place.
Madoff suggests that the estate tax should be completely eliminated because its existence deceives the public about what is really going on. People falsely think that billionaires who pay no federal income tax will at least pay the estate tax when they die. In fact, they are paying neither kind of tax.
Billionaires avoid the income tax by arranging to have no taxable income.
Before 1982 ultra-rich people could not avoid paying income tax. Their income consisted of dividends and capital gains harvested by selling shares of stock, the price of which had increased. Dividends and capital gains are taxable income.
But in 1982 federal regulators weakened a rule prohibiting corporations from buying back their own stock. Since then, many corporations have used profits to buy back stock shares instead of issuing dividends. With fewer shares of stock outstanding and the value of the corporation increasing, the value of each share of stock began increasing dramatically.
What used to be taxable dividends turned into large capital gains benefiting the stock owners, including very rich ones. If shareholders need cash and sell appreciated stock, of course they would owe income taxes on the capital gains (selling price of the stock minus how much the shares cost them). But capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than normal income like salaries, bank interest, and returns on bonds.
As Madoff points out, however, billionaires need not sell any stock to get cash to live on. Instead, they can borrow the money, using their stock as collateral. Borrowed money is not taxable income, so they owe no tax while living extravagantly.
And when they die, the stock they bequest to their heirs gets a stepped up “basis,” so if their heirs sell the stock they will owe no taxes because the stepped up basis leaves no taxable capital gains.
And inherited money is not considered taxable income. Someone who earns $50,000 pays significant income (and payroll) taxes on it, while someone who inherits $1 billion pays no income or payroll tax on it.
Madoff rightly objects to this situation, but she is not arguing that we should “soak the rich” with higher income tax rates at the top. She points out that there are two kinds of “rich” people. One is the working rich, skilled professionals earning high salaries and, usually, already paying very high taxes. A high percentage of all income tax receipts come from these people.
Increasing the high tax rates these “rich” people are already paying would produce insignificant extra revenue for the government.
Instead, Madoff wants to get rid of the ability of ultra-rich people—billionaires—to avoid having any taxable income in the first place. She wouldn’t tax them while they are alive, but would tax whoever inherits from them.
Rather than trying to fix the estate tax, Madoff would abolish it, eliminate the stepped up basis for inherited stock, and make inherited money and other gifts received taxable income for the recipients.
Assuming an exemption for small gifts (to allow birthday presents and the like), this could be a reasonable reform. It would bring in very large amounts of taxes while reducing today’s extreme economic inequality.
For further details, see Ray D. Madoff, The Second Estate: How The Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy. This is one of the two best books I have read since retiring in 2000.
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After Lobbying Blitz, Trump IRS Formally Kills Direct File Program That Would've Saved Americans Billions
"It was never about efficiency, it's about Trump and his billionaire allies taking money from our pockets to make the tax system worse and line the pockets of big business elites in this predatory industry," said a spokesperson at Americans for Tax Fairness.
Aug 01, 2025
In a move backed by private tax-filing corporations, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump officially announced the shut down of the government's free Direct File service this week.
For two years under the administration of former President Joe Biden, the IRS allowed taxpayers in some states to file their taxes online using public software under a pilot program.
A report published in March by the Economic Security Project found that:
At maturity in five years, Direct File would save the average user $160 in filing fees and hours of their time each year, which saves Americans a total of $11 billion annually between filing fees and time costs. By breaking down barriers to filing, Direct File would also deliver up to $12 billion each year in additional tax credits to low-income families currently missing out.
In January, the direct file system was rolled out to 30 million Americans across 25 states, to rave reviews. According to a memo circulated within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the program was "beloved by its users," with a 94% satisfaction rate among those who used it.
But according to IRS Chairman Billy Long, who spoke at a tax summit Monday, it will not be made available again in 2026.
"You've heard of direct file, that's gone," Long gloated. "Big beautiful Billy wiped that out."
"I don't care about Direct File. I care about direct audit," he added, referring to his efforts to make it easier for businesses and individuals under tax audits to get updates on their status.
The budget legislation that Trump signed into law last month did not formally end Direct File, as Long suggested. However, it did allocate $15 million to the Treasury Department for a task force to study public-private partnership alternatives to replace Direct File. "Big beautiful Billy" likely referred to Long himself, whose IRS formally ended the program.
Long's announcement was the culmination of a months-long scheme by private tax-filing corporations like Intuit and H&R Block, and Republicans in government to kill Direct File.
As early as December, following Trump's reelection victory, GOP congresspeople began calling for the program's demise. Twenty-nine of them, who'd accepted a combined $1.8 million in campaign donations from the tax prep industry over their careers, signed onto a letter written by Reps. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) and Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) calling on Trump to issue a "day-one executive order" killing the program.
Long, himself a former congressman from Missouri, raised eyebrows in January 2025, shortly after he was named as Trump's nominee to lead the IRS. According to The Lever, he received a curious $137,000 worth of donations that he then used to pay himself back for a $130,000 loan he'd made to his failed 2022 campaign for the Senate. Around a third of the money came from tax consultancy firms.
In March, following mass layoffs at the IRS by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), staff working on the Direct File system were told to halt their work. Prior to that, Musk wrote on his social media app X that he had "deleted" 18F, the government agency working on the project.
Right after tax day in April, The Associated Press first reported that the administration was planning to end the program.
While consumer advocacy groups called the change a "big loss" for the public, the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights, an astroturf group backed by tax-filing companies, thanked Smith, Edwards, and other GOP congresspeople "for their leadership" calling for the termination of the program.
The program was effectively dead for months, but Long's gleeful coroner's report this week made it official.
"Last year, Direct File saved taxpayers $5.6 million in tax preparation costs by allowing people to file their taxes for FREE," wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) Friday on X. "That's why tax preparation companies like... Intuit lobbied to get rid of it. Trump just gave them their wish."
Despite claims by GOP congresspeople that the program was "wasteful," it actually saved taxpayers much more money than it cost. According to the Economic Security Project's study, "For every dollar invested in the program, Direct File delivers $106 in benefits to American taxpayers, between savings on tax preparation fees and access to untapped tax credits."
"This move exposes what's really happening in Trump's administration," said David Kass, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. "It was never about efficiency, it's about Trump and his billionaire allies taking money from our pockets to make the tax system worse and line the pockets of big business elites in this predatory industry."
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Why Does Trump Really Hate Internationalism? It’s Bad for Billionaires
As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s.
Jul 12, 2025
If you take U.S. President Donald Trump’s word, his foreign policy will finally make American workers great again. Where weak-willed attempts to work with other countries hollowed out the American economy, his belligerent nationalism will push the U.S. up and the rest of the world down. The globalists are for them; Donald Trump is for you!
But taking Donald Trump at his word is never a good idea. As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s. He has fought Japan’s car safety standards and India’s price cap on coronary stents. He has gotten Canada and India to drop taxes on tech giants. And in perhaps his biggest victory, six major countries recently caved to his escalating threats and hollowed out a global plan to enforce a minimum tax on big corporations.
That Trump has fixed his ire on this international agreement reveals a broader truth: Internationalism is bad for billionaires. The misguided approach of neoliberal globalization opened up a lane for nationalists to claim that they defend the working class. But in reality, Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies would like nothing more than to play governments against each other. Billionaires can take fragmented countries to the bank—only international cooperation can build a united front strong enough to beat them.
Trump’s Revenge on the Global Corporate Minimum Tax
The global corporate minimum tax is a good example of this. (The details are a little complicated, but the super-rich would like to keep it that way, so bear with me as I explain.) In recent decades, major corporations have gotten spectacularly effective at avoiding taxes. Last year, Tesla made a profit of $2.3 billion in the U.S. but paid zero federal income tax. Neither did Merck, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson, despite making $45 billion around the world.
Two global dynamics help them achieve this. First, corporations use sophisticated accounting tricks to make their profits show up in countries where they do little actual business, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands—which just so happen to have very low taxes. Second, when countries attempt to raise taxes, corporations threaten to move elsewhere, creating fears of job losses and economic slowdowns that can convince governments to keep taxes low.
Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
In 2021, most of the world’s countries agreed to a tax deal that aimed to counter these dynamics. It was highly imperfect, with too many exceptions and rules skewed against developing countries, but it was still an important step forward. One of its key rules was a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Suppose a Brazilian company paid just 10% in tax for income earned through its Swiss subsidiary. The deal would allow Brazil to apply a top-up tax and collect the remaining 5% itself. This 15% floor meant corporations could no longer drive a race to the bottom in tax rates, as any tax haven with a rate below 15% would just be leaving money on the table—someone else would tax it anyways.
And because congressional Republicans blocked the U.S. from implementing the deal—instead relying on a weaker U.S. version of the minimum tax—that’s what could have happened to American companies. This was how the agreement was supposed to work: If a country like the U.S. was too silly to make sure its companies paid at least 15% in tax, other countries would.
But Donald Trump hated the idea that countries could work together to make sure the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Eli Lilly would pay a fair share of taxes toward schools, hospitals, and roads. In an attempt to spook other countries out of making the corporate minimum tax work, Trump’s tax bill included a “revenge tax” provision that would have hiked taxes on companies from countries that applied it.
In a moment of deep cowardice, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom folded: they agreed to exempt American companies from the minimum tax in exchange for Congress removing the revenge tax provision. While the exact details are not yet clear, it is certain to give a leg up to American corporations avoiding taxes at home and abroad. It will also create a perverse incentive for foreign companies to relocate their headquarters to the U.S. in order to avoid taxes—or at least to hang that fear over countries that consider raising taxes on them. Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
Building the International “We” That Can Beat the Super-Rich
The way big corporations have played countries off each other to avoid taxes echoes a tried-and-tested strategy of advancing the interests of the rich. Corporations threaten to move investment out of countries that raise minimum wages or strengthen environmental standards. When countries reject austerity, financial markets often sell off their currency or demand higher interest rates on government bonds.
Rather than falling into this trap, some countries are demonstrating the unity needed to advance a more equitable economy. Last week, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa launched an alliance for wealth taxes on high-net-worth individuals, while eight countries took steps toward taxing first-class plane tickets and private jets. A major United Nations conference led to an initiative that could coordinate developing countries as they borrow funds, rather than leaving them isolated against their lenders.
These efforts model an internationalism different from the form of globalization that dominated the past few decades. Neoliberal globalization advanced a web of agreements that coordinated countries to place a ceiling on taxes and labor standards, not to raise the floor. Developing countries were markets to be opened, not publics to work alongside.
Corporate globalization needed to end—but the problem was that it was corporate, not that it was global. Nationalists promised to reverse this globalization and take back the spoils unjustly taken by others. But Trump has been far more successful int expanding American corporations’ ability to pillage than enabling everyday Americans to prosper. A balkanized world ensures no one is ever powerful or coordinated enough to subordinate the interest of the super-rich to the interests of the public. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can beat the super-rich, but only if that “we” is big enough to include those beyond our borders.
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Hope Is Not a Villain—But This Kind of Hope Is
We need a movement ready to restore America to the path of becoming the country we've dreamed of being for centuries. Not the fantasy of individual escape, but the reality of collective power.
Jul 04, 2025
I dropped out of high school. Got my GED. Worked as a general contractor in East Tennessee. Built things with my hands. Fixed busted systems. Lived paycheck to paycheck. That was my life, and for most of it, hope meant something real. Hope that a decent day's work would pay the bills. That a roof over your head and a future for your kids wasn't too much to ask.
But somewhere along the way, hope got hijacked.
Now hope looks like scratching off lottery tickets. Buying crypto hoping to get rich quick. Praying your side hustle turns into the next big thing. We don't hope to fix the system anymore.
We hope to escape it. And that kind of hope will kill us.
You see it everywhere. People identify with billionaires instead of their neighbors. They defend the rich because maybe someday they'll be rich too. They talk about taxes like they're one lucky break away from needing a tax shelter. The Hunger Games tried to warn us, and instead we started dressing like the Capitol.
I don't want to kill hope. I want to reclaim it.
Look at the numbers. The average person has a better chance of getting struck by lightning than becoming a billionaire. The odds of winning the lottery? About 1 in 292 million. Meanwhile, the odds of having medical debt? Nearly 1 in 3 Americans. The odds of being laid off or priced out or wiped out by rent? Closer to 1 in 2.
So why do we still believe? Because facing the truth is harder. The truth that the game is rigged. That the rungs of the ladder we were promised have been sawed off; the American Dream got replaced by American Denial.
Hope used to mean something different. It used to mean collective progress. Solidarity. We marched for better wages. We fought for civil rights. We built schools and unions and co-ops. We didn't dream of becoming the landlord. We fought to make rent fair for everyone. But now even our dreams are privatized. We traded shared ambition for selfish aspiration. And we're losing the plot.
I grew up hearing stories from my grandfather, who was one of 13 kids in a sharecropping family. One generation later, he owned 40 acres, grew tobacco, raised cattle, had houses to rent out to his kids. That wasn't just personal grit. That happened because America was actually building things back then. The TVA brought electricity to our region. The interstate highways connected us to the world. There were pathways to a better life that didn't require winning the lottery.
The pathways to prosperity were dismantled. I know because I watched it happen. My woodworking company made furniture components for Lazy Boy, Berkline, Universal, and Vaughn Furniture before NAFTA and CAFTA gutted us. It wasn't just my business. Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.
The pathways to prosperity were dismantled... Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.
The knowledge walked out the door with the last shift supervisor. Towns that had built middle-class prosperity around making things became ghost towns. Skills that took generations to develop got thrown away because some MBA in New York decided labor was cheaper in Mexico. We went from a country that made things to a country that made money off money. From building wealth to extracting it.
Now what do we have? The gig economy. Work three jobs and still can't afford rent. Get told to hustle harder while billionaires build rocket ships. We're supposed to be grateful for the privilege of driving for Uber while the guy who owns Uber buys his fourth mansion.
The whole system is designed to keep us hoping for individual escape instead of collective change. Keep buying those scratch-offs. Keep believing that if you just work hard enough, grind long enough, maybe you'll hit it big. Meanwhile, the people who rigged the game are laughing all the way to the bank.
They want us to think like temporary embarrassed millionaires instead of permanent working people. They want us to defend their tax cuts because someday we might need them too. They want us to vote against our own interests because we've been sold a dream that we're all just one good idea away from joining the club.
The whole system is designed to keep us hoping for individual escape instead of collective change.
But here's what they don't want us to figure out—we're stronger together than any of us could ever be alone. The TVA didn't happen because one guy got lucky. The interstate highways didn't get built because somebody won the lottery. Social Security didn't happen because workers hoped to get rich. These things happened because people organized, fought, and built something together.
I don't want to kill hope. I want to reclaim it. I want a hope that says we can fix this country, not just get rich enough to escape its problems. I want a hope that builds instead of bets. That organizes instead of idolizes. That sees neighbors instead of competitors.
These things happened because people organized, fought, and built something together.
I want hope that understands we don't need to wait for permission from billionaires to make things better. We don't need to hope they'll trickle some wealth down to us. We can build our own wealth by building things that matter. We can create our own prosperity by investing in each other.
What we need is a movement that's ready to do the big things, the hard things. A movement that understands you have to impeach Supreme Court justices who violate constitutional norms or are corrupt. That you have to take a DOGE-like approach to removing revolving door lobbyists from corrupted institutions like the FDA and the SEC. That you have to go hard against the very people who will stand in your way—the same people we're going to see standing in the way of Zohran Mamdani in New York if he's elected mayor. And too often those folks have a D by their name.
We need a movement ready to restore America to the path of becoming the country we've dreamed of being for centuries. Not the fantasy of individual escape, but the reality of collective power. Not lottery tickets and crypto dreams, but the hard work of building something that actually serves the people who live here.
That's the kind of hope worth having. That's the kind of hope that actually works. And that's the kind of hope that scares the hell out of the people running things now.
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The Tip Trick: How the Trump Budget Starves the Working Class
It takes programs that millions rely on—Medicaid, food assistance, student aid—and sacrifices them to fund tax breaks that primarily benefit those who already have the most. It’s a redistribution in reverse.
May 22, 2025
Imagine a woman in her late 20s, raising a young kid and working two jobs. On weekday mornings, she waits tables at a chain diner just off the highway. On weekends, she picks up banquet shifts at a hotel near the airport. Some weeks she hits 40 hours. Most weeks she doesn’t. Her schedule is built around whoever else calls off, whichever babysitter shows up, and how many tips she can pull in when customers don’t walk out on the check. She’s not lazy. She’s tired. She’s not failing. She’s just barely holding on.
She doesn’t ask for much—just enough to stay ahead of the next crisis. One sick day, one bounced check, one broken car door, and it all starts to unravel. Like nearly 60% of Americans, she’s living paycheck to paycheck. This isn’t some outlier story. It’s the American norm, life for millions of workers whose labor keeps the country running, even as their budgets can’t absorb a single emergency.
Last week, she saw a headline. The new House budget plan would eliminate federal income tax on tips. She read it twice. Finally, something for workers like her. Finally, a win.
This budget offers token relief while delivering sweeping cuts.
But what she didn’t see—what the headline didn’t say—is that while she might save a few hundred dollars come tax season, the same bill cuts the healthcare, food, and education programs that actually keep her afloat. It’s not a lifeline, it’s a tradeoff. And it’s a bad one.
Early Thursday morning, May 22, after days of internal negotiations and public brinkmanship, the House narrowly passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a 1,100-page tax and spending package drafted with support from the Trump White House. Despite defections from within their own ranks, GOP leadership managed to push the bill through with no Democratic support and just enough Republican votes to avoid collapse. The measure now moves to the Senate, where further changes are likely, but the core architecture is intact.
The bill includes more than $3.8 trillion in tax cuts, most of which go to the wealthiest households and largest corporations. It makes permanent the 2017 Trump tax cuts, increases the estate tax exemption to $15 million per person, and expands loopholes for business income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top 1% of households would receive an average annual tax cut of approximately $79,000.
And the waitress? If she reports $10,000 in tips next year, she might see a refund boost of around $700. That’s her win. That’s what she gets.
But here’s what she could lose.
If her hours drop below 80 in a given month, and she can’t prove every one of them with pay stubs or employer forms, she could lose her Medicaid coverage. Under the latest version of the bill, these nationwide work requirements are no longer delayed until 2029. They’re scheduled to take effect as early as the end of next year. These requirements don’t just ask that you work. They ask that you document it, every month, without gaps. Miss a report, and your health insurance disappears. No phone call, no warning, just a closed file and an empty pharmacy counter.
If she misses work because her kid’s school is closed or a sitter falls through, she might lose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits too, especially if she doesn’t fill out the right paperwork on time or fails to meet a new state threshold. The revised bill raises the age limit for mandatory work compliance and eliminates long-standing exemptions for parents. The moment her child turns seven, she’s treated like someone with no caregiving responsibilities at all. And for the first time in decades, states will be required to help fund those benefits. If they can’t, or choose not to, those benefits could disappear.
If she tries to go back to school to finish the associate’s degree she started, she may no longer qualify for a Pell Grant. The bill raises the minimum course load for a full award from 12 credits to 15, more than a full-time load at most colleges. For a working mother juggling jobs, that’s not just a higher bar, it’s a locked gate. She’d have to choose between working more hours to afford tuition or taking more classes she can’t pay for to receive aid. Either way, she loses.
And that’s the pattern. Across the board, this budget offers token relief while delivering sweeping cuts. It takes programs that millions rely on—Medicaid, food assistance, student aid—and sacrifices them to fund tax breaks that primarily benefit those who already have the most. It’s a redistribution in reverse. It shifts risk downward and wealth upward. It wraps itself in the language of freedom and choice, while quietly dismantling the systems that offer working people a shot at stability.
This isn’t a misunderstanding of how poverty works. It’s a bet that most people won’t notice until it’s too late. It counts on workers like her being too busy, too tired, or too stressed to read the fine print. It counts on the headlines focusing on the tip exemption, not the Medicaid paperwork that knocks her off coverage. Not the missed deadline that shuts off SNAP. Not the registration block that forces her to drop out of community college. It makes the punishment quiet and the payoff loud.
We know who this helps. And we know who it hurts.
As of late 2024, approximately 78.5 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. In fiscal year 2023, 42.1 million participated in SNAP each month, and school meal programs served more than 4.6 billion lunches. The majority who rely on these services are children, seniors, and working families. By contrast, according to the Yale Budget Lab, fewer than 2.5% of U.S. households would benefit from the tip tax exemption, and only about 5% of low- and moderate-wage workers are employed in traditionally tipped occupations. And even among them, the average gain won’t cover a single unexpected car repair. The math doesn’t work. The logic doesn’t hold. But the politics do.
Because the waitress at the diner won’t get a press release when her SNAP balance goes to zero. She won’t get a spotlight when her kid’s lunch bill doubles or when she finds herself sitting in the ER without coverage. She’ll just keep showing up. Keep working. Keep holding the line with less and less help.
And that $700 refund?
It won’t pay for the inhaler when her daughter’s asthma flares up. It won’t buy a month of groceries when benefits are cut. It won’t fix the brake line on the car that barely starts. It won’t cover tuition when she’s one semester away from finishing a degree. It won’t save her when the safety net snaps under her feet.
No matter how “beautiful” they say the bill is, it won’t hold her life together when everything else is falling apart.
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Tell Congress to Stop Spending Your Tax Dollars on Nuclear Weapons
We have the answer to realize significant cost savings, while simultaneously promoting sound fiscal policies that benefit us all and don’t threaten the survival of the human race.
Apr 16, 2025
This week was the week that our 2024 taxes were due in order to fund the fiscal year 2025 federal budget and thus our nation’s priorities. This year’s budget represents the final Biden budget. It comes at a time when our country is in a deliberate state of chaos instituted by the current administration. Under the non-elected efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency and current cabinet, we find punitive and seemingly random disjointed cutting of essential services and vital programs in addition to international aid that cuts to the core of who America is.
U.S. Congress has just passed a budget resolution requiring $1.5 trillion in savings to be realized over the next 10 years. Ultimately, budgets are moral documents. How do the current cuts, in addition to planned cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, address our needs and follow a moral compass? How does funding nuclear weapons factor in when addressing our needs and priorities?
This year’s federal tax expenditure for all nuclear weapons programs will be $110,344,000,000. This figure was released on Tax Day in this year’s U.S. Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project. That amounts to $3,499 per second. This year will see an increase of roughly $15.8 billion over FY 2024. Congress prides itself in being fiscally responsible. Yet when cities like Detroit are spending over $114 million on nuclear weapons programs, Atlanta over $245 million, Chicago over $961 million, and the impoverished Navajo nation of roughly 113,000 people are spending over $18 million, where is the rationale, fiscal responsibility, and sanity?
Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated.
The continuation of this out-of-control escalation is fueled by the myth of deterrence with dramatic increases in weapons delivery systems and missile defeat and defense expenditures. The latter is the present day version of former President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or “Star Wars.” Today’s version continues the elusive and easily outfoxed goal of hitting a bullet with a bullet to defend us coupled with a complex early detection system. With roughly 12,331 nuclear weapons in today’s global arsenals, the world remains closer to nuclear war than at any point in the past 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts our current risk at 89 seconds to midnight and nuclear Armageddon. That risk assessment comes from the current geopolitical turmoil; climate change; and evolving disruptive technologies that increase the risk of nuclear war either by intent, miscalculation, or accident presenting a very real and present danger. Everything and everyone we care about is threatened with the distinct possibility of ending the human race.
Ultimately, the only way to prevent a nuclear war is to abolish these weapons. Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated. What is needed is the political will. The people need to speak, and when the people lead, the leaders will follow.
Fortunately, there is a U.S. grassroots movement, Back From the Brink, bringing diverse communities together to eliminate nuclear weapons. This movement calls on the United States to take a leadership role in bringing together the world’s nuclear powers to negotiate a time-bound, verifiable, and complete elimination of all nuclear weapons. It includes four precautionary measures to safeguard against nuclear war until that goal is achieved. These include renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack; taking U.S. weapons off of hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.
Anyone can endorse this campaign. Presently 495 organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 430 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress have endorsed this campaign.
Last week Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) introduced U.S. House Res. 317, which lays out how we can fundamentally reform U.S. nuclear weapons policy and achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. In addition to supporting the policy points of Back From the Brink, this resolution supports: the maintenance of a de facto global moratorium on nuclear testing, protecting communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons by fully remediating their deadly legacy of environmental contamination past and current, and actively pursuing a just economic transition for the civilian and military workforce involved in this entire nuclear cycle.
We have the answer to realize significant cost savings, while simultaneously promoting sound fiscal policies that benefit us all. With life itself hanging in the balance we all must demand a meeting with our legislative leaders, urging them to endorse this legislation. If they refuse, we must ask why they are willing to put everything at risk?
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that taxpayers would pay $3,498,985.29 per second for nuclear weapons this year. The actual figure is $3,499 per second. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
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Trump and Musk Are Making It Harder for the IRS to Catch Wealthy Tax Cheats
Musk and Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.
Mar 29, 2025
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, beginning with 6,700 layoffs. Their stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.
Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers that make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.
Musk and President Donald Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.
The real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations.
So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.
Gutting the IRS will hurt the middle class by reducing the taxes billionaires and corporations pay for our public services. It passes the bill to working class taxpayers to cover veteran’s services, infrastructure, national parks, and defense.
When it comes to taxes, the wealthy aren’t like you or me. Most wage earners have our state and federal taxes withheld from our monthly paychecks. Ninety percent of taxpayers use the simple standard deduction filing and hope we get a refund.
But billionaires and multimillionaires are different. Their income comes mostly from investments and assets—which they can hide. They hire experts from the “wealth defense industry”—an armada of tax lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers—to minimize their taxes and maximize inheritances for their fortunate children.
They deploy anonymous shell companies, complex trusts, and bank accounts in tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and South Dakota to aid their clients in minimizing taxes—tools not available to ordinary taxpayers. According to the Tax Justice Network, over $21 trillion is now hidden in tax havens like these.
A 2021 exposé by ProPublica found that more than half of the 100 wealthiest U.S. billionaires use a complex trust system to avoid estate taxes, which at the current level only kicks in for people with wealth over $13.99 million.
This aggressive tax dodging by the superrich has resulted in an enormous “tax gap” between what they owe and what’s collected. For the last few years, this gap is estimated at $700 billion a year—almost the size of the Pentagon budget.
Working and middle class taxpayers will pick up the slack, or see their services cut. Most likely some of this gap will be added to the $36 trillion national debt, requiring us to pay on an installment plan.
In previous decades, the IRS had the expertise to keep up with the schemes that billionaires and transnational corporations use to dodge their taxes. But over the last two decades, their capacity to catch wealthy crooks and grifters has been decimated by cuts.
Things started to turn around again in 2021, when Congress voted to invest in enforcement. And already, the investment was starting to pay off. A year ago, the IRS announced they’d recovered $482 million from millionaires who hadn’t paid their debts.
Trump and Musk are now reversing these modest gains.
As the agency people love to hate, the IRS was an easy target for Trump’s anti-government attacks. But the real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations. With an understaffed IRS, their tax shell games can operate without scrutiny—something seven previous IRS commissioners from both parties recently spoke out against.
We may not agree about everything in the federal budget, but most people agree the wealthy should pay their fair share of whatever expenses we share. And it’s hard to catch the criminals if you remove all the cops on the beat.
The billionaires will be popping their champagne bottles. Even with the higher tariffs on European bubbly, they can afford the best.
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Trump-Musk Plan to Gut IRS Denounced as 'Blatant Power Grab'
"These layoffs will significantly impair the agency's ability to answer the phones and provide good service to taxpayers and hamper the agency's ability to investigate wealthy and powerful tax cheats," said one advocate.
Mar 05, 2025
Following reporting that the Internal Revenue Service is preparing to cut as much as 50% of its workforce, advocates are sounding the alarm that those cuts would negatively impact regular Americans who pay taxes and diminish the agency's ability to audit wealthy tax evaders.
The plans to drastically reduce personnel at the IRS was first reported Tuesday by The New York Times, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
A reduction in force of tens of thousands of workers would render the agency "dysfunctional," John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner, told The Associated Press.
The planned staff reductions at the IRS are part of a larger targeting of the federal workforce by the Trump administration. Billionaire Elon Musk, who U.S. President Donald Trump has deputized to help oversee the slashing of federal personnel and programs, has been central to that effort.
The Times reported that the Department of Government Efficiency "has taken a keen interest in the IRS in recent weeks" and two representatives from DOGE have been working from the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "They have pushed for access to agency databases, including, most recently, one that has information about the agency's contractors," per the Times.
Ian Gary, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, blasted the reported plans to reduce IRS staff by half.
“A fair, transparent, and well-funded tax system is vital to a functioning democratic society," said Gary in a statement on Tuesday. "These cuts are also likely to disproportionately affect recent investments and hiring in the tax agency that have greatly improved its capacity to audit wealthy tax cheats and unscrupulous corporations. At the same time, such drastic staffing cuts will affect service levels for ordinary Americans."
Gary also said that the planned cuts "represent an existential threat to the revenues needed to operate the federal government."
The agency that nearly every working American adult interacts with each year has already experienced workforce reductions. There were some 100,000 workers at the IRS as of mid-January, according to theTimes. However, more than 7,000 probationary IRS employees have already been laid off, and thousands more have taken Musk's offer to resign.
"Those cuts, as well as normal attrition, are expected to count toward the Trump administration's goal of halving the number of people who work at the IRS," per the Times.
The executive director of the group Americans For Tax Fairness, David Kass, also denounced the news of the potential cuts: "These layoffs will significantly impair the agency's ability to answer the phones and provide good service to taxpayers and hamper the agency's ability to investigate wealthy and powerful tax cheats."
Kass also called the move a "blatant power grab—led by the Trump administration and the world's wealthiest individual— to deliberately weaken the IRS to further enrich themselves and their billionaire allies."
It was already known that the Trump administration's next move is to carry out mass "reduction in force" plans across agencies.
Last week the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency leaders giving them guidance on how to come up with "large-scale" reduction in force and reorganization plans that are due March 13. However, according to The Associated Press, "it is unclear whether the White House will approve the IRS' reorganization plan and over what period of time it would be implemented."
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Senate Democrats Say DOGE Has 'No Right to Hoover up Taxpayer Data' at IRS
Operatives of Elon Musk, warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren, "are attempting to access confidential tax information—tax returns, bank data, Social Security numbers—for millions of Americans."
Feb 17, 2025
As Americans prepare to file their taxes ahead of the April 15 deadline, two Democratic senators warned Monday that billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk's arrival at the Internal Revenue Service raises serious privacy concerns and could significantly impact the tens of millions of people who count on their tax refunds each year to pay bills, pad their emergency savings, and afford other essentials.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the advisory body created by President Donald Trump and headed by Musk, has set its sights on the IRS as it works to gut agencies across the federal government—with the data of millions of ordinary taxpayers now among the troves of personal information DOGE is trying to seize.
As The Washington Post reported, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to give DOGE employees access to agency systems and datasets including the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS).
The system allows a limited number of IRS employees to access IRS accounts of every individual taxpayer, business, and nonprofit in the country, including people's personal identification numbers and bank information, and enables them to change transaction data.
DOGE's "meddling with IRS systems in the middle of tax filing season could, inadvertently or otherwise, cause breakdowns that may delay the issuance of tax refunds indefinitely," said Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
The MOU states that Gavin Kliger, a software engineer working with DOGE, should have access to the IDRS, enabling DOGE to "eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, and improve government performance to better serve the people."
According to the memo reviewed by the Post, Kliger—who sources said had not officially been granted the access mentioned in the MOU as of Sunday night—will be tasked with consulting on modernizing the IRS' systems.
Even though outside contractors are used for technical upgrades or fixes to a system widely recognized as "antiquated," the Post noted that it is "highly unusual" for a political appointee of partisan body like DOGE to obtain access to the IDRS.
"The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal," Nina Olson, who served as the agency's national taxpayer advocate for nearly two decades, told the newspaper. "Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated."
In their letter to acting IRS Commissioner Douglas O'Donnell, Warren and Wyden (D-Ore.) noted that the tax code has long prohibited "executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations."
"These prohibitions have long prevented political appointees in previous administrations from accessing the private tax records of hundreds of millions of Americans, and allowing DOGE officials sweeping access these systems may be in violation of these statutes," said Warren and Wyden, who serve as ranking members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and Senate Finance Committees, respectively. "Violations of these taxpayer privacy laws, including unauthorized access to or disclosure of tax returns and return information, can result in criminal penalties, including incarceration."
Without naming Trump, the lawmakers referenced Charles Littlejohn, the IRS contractor who was sentenced last year to five years in federal prison for leaking the president's tax returns to The New York Times after Trump refused to publicly disclose them.
"Until we fought to the Supreme Court and won, the president shielded his tax returns from the people," said the Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee in a social media post. "Now, he's given yours to the richest man in the world."
Warren and Wyden wrote that "software engineers working for Musk seeking to gain access to tax return information have no right to hoover up taxpayer data and send that data back to any other part of the federal government and may be breaking the law if they are doing so."
In addition to seeking access to the personal financial data of millions of Americans, DOGE is reportedly preparing to oversee the firing of 10,000 probationary employees at the IRS.
"Any delay in refunds could be financially devastating to millions of Americans who plan their budgets around timely refunds every spring," said Warren and Wyden. "We demand that the IRS immediately clarify the extent to which DOGE team members may have inspected or be seeking to inspect the private tax return information of millions of Americans and whether taxpayer privacy laws are being enforced to prevent unauthorized disclosure and intrusions."
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