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- [00:01]
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- [00:45]
Andrew Egger
Hey guys, this is Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. I am here with our economics reporter Katherine Rampel to talk about an interesting PR stunt that we got from Donald Trump at the White House today when he ordered McDonald's Twitter DoorDash to the White House.
- [00:59]
Katherine Rampel
McDonald,
- [01:05]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
Nice to see you.
- [01:06]
Katherine Rampel
Nice to meet you. DoorDash want to inform you, Mr. President, look at this.
- [01:14]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
This doesn't look staged, does it?
- [01:16]
Andrew Egger
Not necessarily the easiest place to drive up to under ordinary circumstances, but they made a little exception here for, for a strange, basically, hey, remember when we passed that one big beautiful bill and got rid of no tax on tips last year? Wasn't that great? Wasn't, didn't we have a lot of good feelings around that time sort of stunt for everybody? So let's, Katherine, before we, before we play a couple clips from this here, what was your, what was your kind of general take on, can you maybe like roll back a little bit of, of, of the history of, of, of what's going on with the, with the no tax on tips stuff that's happening in America right now?
- [01:53]
Katherine Rampel
Yeah. So the one big beautiful bill included a tax carve out for tip related income. This was something that actually got, had gotten some bipartisan support in the past. I believe Kamala Harris had also said that she would cut taxes or eliminate taxes on tips as well in the 2024 election, in part because both candidates at the time were vying for the Nevada vote vote and there are a lot of tipped workers in Nevada. As I think I probably said at the time, this was not a great idea. Carving out taxes on tip income only creates a lot of bad incentives. Like why doesn't everybody, to the extent possible, just re categorize their income as tips? Otherwise why are we treating so many different kinds of workers differently? Like if you work in a warehouse or you work as a teacher's aide or, you know, almost any other occupation that is not reliant on tip income, why are, why is your income treated any differently. So it creates a lot of, like, weird disparities and distortions in the, in the economy, in the system, and incentivizes people to the extent possible to get their income relabeled as tip income. It's also not particularly progressive, given that if the idea is to help lower wage workers, we already have a system that has a large standard deduction that exempts the first. I don't know what the number is this year. It's like 29,000, I think is the, the standard deduction for married couples. Sorry if I got that. I didn't get that exactly right. But it's something along those lines. So that's already carved out from taxation. So this was not a great idea from like a tax swank perspective. I understand why this was the kind of thing that sounded like it was magnanimous at the time, particularly for important constituencies, particularly in potential swing states, but was not a great tax idea. And this was a photo op to try to, you know, create some warm and fuzzy feelings around that.
- [04:05]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, not a, not a great, not a great tax idea according to the eggheads, according to you economists, but from sort of the sloppy list side of things. Money, total money. I mean, there's a reason why as soon as Trump rolled this one out, you know, these were campaign promises of his. No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime. And there's a reason why Kamala Harris very quickly thereafter was like, I also love these ideas. Right. And I don't know, of the three, of the three, I'm sort of inclined to see no tax on tips as maybe the least dumb of them, maybe the least objectionable of them. Maybe I'm wrong about that.
- [04:44]
Katherine Rampel
It's the least distortionary in the sense that probably a lot of tip income wasn't getting reported anyway, you know, so, like, if you're getting, if you're getting tipped in cash, a lot of those tips are not getting reported to the irs. I guess if you're a doordasher in this case and you are getting tipped through the app, you know, through somebody's credit card, probably Doordash is reporting that on your 1099. I'm not actually sure.
- [05:09]
Andrew Egger
Well, that's, that's actually what I was. What I was just going to say was that this seems like a pretty smart person for Trump as he's trying to sell this bill to be spotlighting because this is like the rare tip reliant employee who the vast, vast majority of their tipped income is actually being processed Via the app, via the credit cards and all those sorts of things. So I am perfectly.
- [05:32]
Katherine Rampel
He tips her in cash, right? He gave her $100 bill in cash.
- [05:36]
Andrew Egger
Yes. Well, that was very nice of her and very nice of him not to claw any back, but I don't know this. I wanna get to a couple clips of this whole event, because the policy of the no tax on tips. With the anniversary of the one big beautiful bill coming up, the president has been wanting to get everybody to stop thinking about the ways in which he's destroying the economy now and get back to thinking about this big piece of legislation that he passed last year to get them all happy instead of grumpy about things. But it was funny because even in this moment, she plainly is just there as sort of a doordash. Sort of. I don't know what you'd call it. A doordash? Yeah, sure. A prop. An ambassador. A doordash ambassador in this photo op. But Trump once keeps wanting her to weigh in all kinds of other stuff. So let's. Let's play a couple of these clips from the president asking this poor woman who's just there to kind of puff up his policy what some of her other views are on things they want
- [06:37]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
to have men playing in women's sport. Do you think that men should play in women's sports?
- [06:43]
Katherine Rampel
I really don't have an opinion on that.
- [06:44]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
You don't? I'll bet you do.
- [06:46]
Katherine Rampel
No, I'm here about attacks on tips.
- [06:49]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
Yeah.
- [06:54]
Andrew Egger
Okay.
- [06:55]
Katherine Rampel
That's some good media training right there. Yeah.
- [06:58]
Andrew Egger
Yes, yes, yes. You never know. You never know when you take a random person. I mean, like all this DC Media that we're all sort of bombarded with all the time, the amount of sort of time and effort and discipline and practice that has gone into sort of sanding off of the edges of everybody's personality and making sure there aren't gonna be a lot of surprises and things like that. It all kind of makes you forget that, like a lot of times when random people are sort of plucked into it and, like, you know, are suddenly part of a White House press conference, there at the White House, interesting things can happen. So it appears that this woman was very wisely sort of either instructed or else just sort of under her own prudential power, decided that she was gonna be a single issue prop during this particular event. Let's do one other thing, because this was the funniest was the President, who, again, had made this a big part of his campaign pledge in 2024, being like, I bet you voted for me, right? Let's hit that.
- [07:55]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
Nice. Would you like to do a little news conference with me? With these people? These are not the nicest people. They're not nice like you. You know that, right? I'll do whatever you ask me to do, sir. So the no tax on tips is something special, right?
- [08:08]
Katherine Rampel
It's very special.
- [08:09]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
And that's one that really pertains to you more than anything else.
- [08:12]
Katherine Rampel
Yes, sir. Yes.
- [08:13]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
It's fantastic. So it was such an honor to meet you and I think you voted for me.
- [08:17]
Katherine Rampel
Do, uh, maybe.
- [08:19]
DoorDash Ambassador / Sharon Simmons
Yeah. I heard you're a great supporter and we appreciate it.
- [08:23]
Katherine Rampel
Thank you.
- [08:24]
Andrew Egger
I got a shiver. He turns so much colder. Right, Right in that moment, he's like, well, I heard you're a great supporter. Are you gonna deny it? Are you gonna. I mean, am I reading that wrong? Maybe that's. Maybe that is not actually what I mean.
- [08:34]
Katherine Rampel
I think he was hoping for her to lavish praise upon him, which is what he expects of everyone who comes within, you know, a 10 foot radius of him. And she was clearly instructed, again, not to. To try, to the extent possible, I assume, to not make this political, to make this about, you know, not make it partisan in the event, to make it about the policy that clearly her, I would say her employer. But she's probably a 1099 contract worker that Doordash wanted to highlight. Because Doordash benefits from this policy as well, because it means that their workers can, or their contractors in any way can have higher take home pay, again, higher than people in comparably paid jobs in other occupations and industries for no other reason than the fact that this was the pandering that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris decided to pursue.
- [09:29]
Andrew Egger
Well, it's good to get pandered to every once in a while. It makes you feel nice. This woman's name, her name? Sharon Simmons, we know a little bit about her because Doordash kind of put out a little bit of a brief. She's. She's a grandmother of 10 from Arkansas. She's worked for DoorDash since 2020. She says last year she received $11,000 in tips, which, you know, I can't do any math. Maybe you can. That's at least $1,000 in savings, right? And it says it helped her cover her husband's cancer treatment. About $1,000 at least toward that. So, you know, good for her. And hopefully she got a little, a little something from, from being a Doordash ambassador for this event as well, which, which you never Know, but, but let's do. Let's do one more thing on the voting thing.
- [10:06]
Katherine Rampel
Can I just say one thing before we move on about that? So it is this. I think this is meant to be a very heartwarming story about this woman who, you know, hustled and decided to become a doordasher as her husband was undergoing cancer treatments. She says in some of these interviews that she used up all of her savings to help pay for the out of pocket costs for the cancer treatments. And look at her benefiting from the largesse of this president who decided to exempt tips from taxation. I do not see this as a heartwarming story. I mean, this is a woman who is a grandmother of 10 who looks like she is or should be approaching retirement age. Her husband is suffering from cancer, and she's out there hustling for tips. And so she's just like, hoping for a tax break to make those tips stretch a little bit further. Like, this does not seem like the greatest. I know it's supposed to make us feel warm and fuzzy, but it's like, I would much rather think of this woman being able to care for her husband and not go through her life savings because he got cancer and not be out hustling for tips every minute that she can. I don't know. I feel like this kind of reminds me of those stories that you see about GoFundMes where people are, you know, raising money to help pay for their horrible illness treatment or whatever it is or something, you know, some. Some terrible accident. Something that's supposed to, like, be heartwarming because, like, look at all the, the charitable instincts that, like, you know, people are. Regular Americans are willing to bestow upon this poor person who was screwed by the system. And it's like. But shouldn't we be talking about how the system keeps screwing people? I don't know. I mean, I know that that's not the, that's not supposed to be the takeaway from this photo op. This seems like a very nice lady. I admire her fortitude and her ability to, you know, keep her family going under what sounds like pretty stressful circumstances. But. Yeah, I don't know, like, something about this whole setup makes me feel a little icky, independent of the merits of a tax policy that we are discussing. Okay, we can move on.
- [12:28]
Andrew Egger
No, you know, I honestly, I had been so focused on sort of the president and like, the weird ways that he responded to all this, I genuinely had not even thought about the story along those particularly grim lines. So, yeah, I mean, I'm right there with you. Let's hit one more clip. Not to immediately revisit the voting thing, but I just. Look, I'm only flesh and blood. It's a funny clip. I kind of wanna play it. I hope that's okay.
- [12:50]
Katherine Rampel
Let's say I know what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it.
- [12:52]
Bullshot Sponsor Announcer
Did you vote for him?
- [12:53]
VRBoCare Announcer
I have, yep.
- [12:56]
Bullshot Sponsor Announcer
In the last election.
- [12:57]
Katherine Rampel
Well, I, I was actually moved so I hadn't had a chance to change my voter registration. But, you know, again, this is about no tax on tips. And that's really what I'm here for.
- [13:13]
Andrew Egger
This poor woman. I mean, it's so relatable, honestly. Honestly, so relatable. My heart goes out to her there because she knows that there are gonna be people who are mad at her for not saying that she voted for him in the last election. And so the question is, did you vote for him? And she said, I have. And it's just like, please don't follow up. Just accept that answer. Don't make me lie. And also, she could have just lied, but apparently she has a certain amount of moral fiber and doesn't wanna fib on national tv. And so, yeah, I mean, I genuinely, I sympathize so much with the sort of slight display of anguish and then the very professional and well executed pivot back to her point, back to no tax on tips.
- [13:54]
Katherine Rampel
She's gotten some good media training. We have to assume, I mean, the other. Not to be like the Eeyore throughout all of this. The other thing that's like, you're the economist, sort of distressing about that whole interview is also that, do you think in previous administrations if there were like, normal person attesting to the benefits of some particular policy, they would have been subject to this kind of like, loyalty test? Like, did, did you vote for that president? I don't think so. And I mean, I don't know, maybe there are some, there's some arch footage somewhere suggesting that, like, there's somebody that benefited from some Barack Obama, like tax change or Biden tax change or whatever. And they were asked, did you vote for him? But I think that this has become a more normal thing to ask people, in part because Donald Trump has been so explicit about he's going to reward the people who voted for him. I mean, that's why he, he explicitly asked, asked this woman when she was there for this photo op about a tax policy. Did you vote for, I hear you voted for me. And then there's a follow up from media and it's just like we have shifted away from the idea that presidents and policymakers in general are supposed to be like politicians for all of their constituents as opposed to just those who voted for them. And so there's this sort of assumption that there's some kind of explicit transactional nature that because she voted for him, she is going, you know, like, then he is going to reward her with this benefit. I mean, you know, obviously there's no like, presumably part, you know, political, like voter, voter test on your 1040 when you're paying your taxes, do you qualify for this tax break or not? But that's the assumption in our political discourse right now that the kind of person who would be held up as a beneficiary must necessarily be a Trumper, not just a normal person who maybe didn't even vote in the last election, as opposed to like a loyal Trump acolyte. So I don't know, there's like something weird about that. Like that just new reframing of how we think about, like how to judge whether a policy is meritorious or not. Does it reward the people that voted for the person passing the policy? I don't know.
- [16:22]
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- [17:56]
Andrew Egger
I'm glad you brought that up because, and you alluded to this a little bit as well, but we should note that, like the reason why you bring that up, it's not just like some weird quirk like the president happened to ask that today. I mean, this is a really consistent through line with this president in all of his messaging across a whole host of different things. I mean, anytime he is talking about energy policy, maybe he'll do an event with coal miners or something like that, or steel workers. And it will not just be, look at how good my administration has been to you people. It will be, look how good my administration has been to you people. And aren't you people such big Trump people? Or farmers? Trump's farm policy. Trump will never do a tweet or a truth social post about the fact that he's going to give a bunch of money to farmers without dwelling at length on the fact that he considers farmers a key MAGA constituency. Or when he tweets about FEMA reimbursements in disaster areas, he will, he will take pains to, you know, talk about these, this money that is flowing out to red states where, you know, that state's great patriots voted for him in 2024. And he'll talk about the, you know, the, the voter split of that state or and we also know just from, from the data, Trump does not actually belabor this point, but it is in fact true that his administration is distributing money through channels like FEMA more generously to red states, more easy approvals to states that are run by Republicans and have Republican governments coming to lobby him to sort of disperse these funds than he is to Democratic states. So you're absolutely right to point that out because it really is like a sort of low level through line of policy in this administration.
- [19:43]
Katherine Rampel
Yeah, I kind of remember there was reporting, was it last year, year with the, the fires in the LA area? And there was some reporting about how some of his aides were like trying to show him there are Trump voters there. As if that should be the litmus test or the motivation for extending help to Americans who are suffering. It's only if they are Trump voters. And I, I feel like that was the subtext of this, what was again supposed could have been a politically neutral photo op about, look, look at this great tax policy. You know, maybe I don't agree with it, but lots of other people like it. Instead it was about, look how I am help how I am rewarding the people who showed their loyalty to me. It's so explicit and you know, it. Like, I don't know, it's just, it's a, it's a bummer. It's a bummer all around that that's the lens through which policy making is done now.
- [20:39]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you one other thing, which is just on the kind of broader subject of this sort of sloppy list approach to doing economic policy. Politicians have never been above this kind of thing, like in either party. Like if there's an opportunity to sort of concentrate a benefit and distribute a cost and then like make a giant deal out of pointing a bunch of TV cameras at that small concentrated benefit, even if it's bad economic policy, like you're going to find politicians who are willing to do that in both policies seven days a week and 365 days a year. At the same time. I really do think that there is sort of an internal fight in the Democratic Party right now of how to sort of approach some of these issues of like Donald Trump, after years and years of Republicans, for better or worse, tending to embrace more sort of like free market and low tax and all these sorts of things that at least, when, at least on a good day are aimed at just sort of like actual economic growth and all these sorts of things. We don't need to get into that. Don't crucify me about all that. But now you've got Donald Trump just pretty explicitly going for like the low hanging sloppy list stuff. In 2024, you saw Kamala Harris sort of chasing him to a lot of these policies. I mean, you really can see the conditions of like a real race to the bottom on some of this stuff where people are just thinking up stupider and stupider and stupider tax ideas and not wanting to get outflanked because like on first, on first blush they sound really good or they seem good or you can imagine a constituency getting behind them. I mean, like, what, what would you say to like a Democratic politician who is genuinely like, yeah, like maybe this isn't really good policy, but like, you know, what's the harm of, of, of sort of like not letting Trump outflank us on this stuff?
- [22:19]
Katherine Rampel
I think the argument is like, don't get high on your own supply. I think the real problem is if it's just about like putting out some dumb rhetoric because that's going to help you get to the, you know, get an advantage, like in the next election. And it's vague enough that, you know, you're not actually going to do something that is actively economically harmful, like pedants like me. Personally pedants like me may give you a hard time, but I don't think it's like such a bad thing. The real risk is when these, when you see politicians, like start to backfill evidence to support the thing, like the dumb thing, that's an easy slogan. And then they kind of actually convince themselves of. Of the thing, either because they've cobbled together some fake evidence or they've done push polling or whatever. I mean, the specific example I'm thinking of in particular was a lot of the greedflation stuff from the, whatever it was like 2022, 2021-2024 era, where Democrats were really struggling with how to message on inflation, which was largely about supply side issues that were forced by Covid but contributed to by some demand side issues, including a massive spending bill that Biden and the Democrats in the legislature passed that probably worsened inflation. So they took some of the blame, but not all of the blame. And because they didn't want to take any of the blame, instead they started saying, well, this is about greedy corporations, and corporations are just trying to rip you off by raising prices. And it's like, well, they are raising prices and they are greedy, but corporations are always greedy. It's not like all of a sudden they got greedier. And how do you legislate a policy around greed? It turns, they tried to. And they, they tried to legislate policies around greed, which you just cannot do. Like, you can't legislate people, you know, legislate against greed. You can't tell people to like, stop wanting to profit. But that's effectively what they tried to do and tried to have. You know, at one point there was legislation to basically put in place price controls against. I forget what the exact verbiage was, but it was something like, like unconscionably high prices, something like that. And, you know, if this had just been a messaging bill, which initially I kind of wrote it off as maybe that would be one thing. But then it became basically part of Kamala Harris's economic platform where they went back and forth about whether she embraced this particular bill or not. And so that's what I mean when I say, like, don't get high on your own supply. I understand that you don't want to, like, like you're not going to put out a 50 point plan that like is, you know, you're not going to like advertise that to the public anyway. You're, you're not going to like try to convince voters with your very detailed regression analysis and like econometric analysis or whatever. Like I don't expect, I don't expect you to message on that stuff. But you still do have to deliver good outcomes and that kind of evidence based policy making and rigorous research will help you deliver good outcomes. The problem is when you convince yourself that the easy like sloppy list thing to do will actually deliver good outcomes and you undermine you, you actually undermine your own agenda by creating worse outcomes, creating worse policies. Which is what happens if you have price controls, just as one example. Or what happens if you try to combat inflation by cutting people checks which will, which sounds popular but actually, you know, increases prices, increases inflation or similarly tariffs. Another thing that like sounds very popular in the abstract. Democrats have been very pro tariff in the past. In fact, as you alluded to earlier, it was generally Republicans who were more free market. And so it was really hard for Democrats to like criticize a lot of Trump's tariffs last time around and even when Biden was president because Biden kept almost all of Trump's tariffs in place. So they kind of like, if they ignore the evidence in favor of the political slogan, it makes it harder for them to actually deliver the thing that your voters will want even if they don't understand like exactly the mechanism from how you get from point A to point B. So yeah, I mean, it's like, still listen to the experts, at least know if you're coming to the right answer. You can ignore the economists. I think that's often fine and often the right thing to do. But you should at least know what the evidence says a policy would, would likely deliver as opposed to just ignoring things that are inconvenient or things that are hard to message and just going in a different direction and then like again, reverse engineering the evidence or the polling or whatever to support that particular policy and then being surprised all of a sudden when that policy does not deliver better. Look standards for your.
- [27:35]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, I really like that frame of not tricking yourself into thinking that this like silly pledge that you have made is actually the thing that's going to like deliver economic results for you. Because I think we are all kind of living through a version of that right now where the President's economic agenda is just one big pile of these with a couple of exceptions. But it's all tariffs. It's all these exemptions and a couple different taxes, tax cuts. And then it's, it's, you know, it's magical thinking, like it's okay for us to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed because they'll all just come here and buy our oil and so we'll make a lot of money that way. Just all this stuff. It's like. It is. We are kind of living through a world of all of these things.
- [28:15]
Katherine Rampel
Sometimes they agree on things. Like there's, you know, there's been some bipartisan support for fixing the housing crisis by banning institutional investors from building new or, or making it harder anyway for them to build, build to rent housing, which, like, yeah, you can shake your fist at big corporations, but actually that's going to reduce the housing supply and make housing more expensive. But, you know, that's like too complicated to actually explain in a slogan. Much easier to say, we're just going to crack down on the big corporations and deliver you cheaper housing. And then everybody's surprised when the exact opposite happens.
- [28:50]
Andrew Egger
I do have to disagree with you on one small point, by the way. The build to rent thing is a giant hobby horse of mine too. So it's not that. But I actually, I'm not 100% sure corporations didn't get greedier after Covid. My understanding is that everybody got worse after Covid across a wide and rich range of measures. Being stuck in our houses really did just actually make us dumber and more paranoid and, you know, less likely to read and less likely to get good sleep and more likely to sort of just indulge in all sorts of bad things. And I think that happened to CEOs, too. So I don't know if there were actual economic impacts, but I do think probably the corporate.
- [29:25]
Katherine Rampel
You think the individual hand got grabbed.
- [29:27]
Andrew Egger
Evil. Yes, that's right. That's possible. That's just, that's just an idea that I would float out there. It seems like. It seems, seems worth, seems worth, you know, throwing to the people of YouTube just for fun. But, but we can, we can, we can call it there. Thanks to the president for, for putting on such a, such a scintillating display of sort of economic good feelings today. Thanks to that lady. Thanks to Sharon Simmons for zagging a couple of times in ways that were pleasant to all of us. We hope you're doing great. We hope your husband is doing well. And thanks to you, Katherine, for coming on and talking through all this stuff. And last but not least, thanks to all you guys out there in TV land. I feel like I am on stage at the Oscars. Thanks to all you people out there in TV land for watching, for subscribing, for sticking with us through all this stuff. We'll be around, we'll keep talking about it all. So thanks and we'll see you all next time.
- [30:18]
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