Ideas For Sale

The media loves ideas when they're someone else's:

Last weekend, the incumbent vice president tried to pass off Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on tips as her own. “When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she said. The sudden campaign promise follows months of the presumptive presidential nominee avoiding interviews while flipping on nearly every issue on her platform, from bans on fracking to passing “Medicare for All.” Yet the press has given Harris a free pass less than three months from Election Day and just a month away from the first votes being cast in Pennsylvania as the far-left candidate campaigns without any kind of comprehensive policy platform. When it comes to taxes on tips, however, Harris gave her position, and the episode offered another case study in media bias covering two identical positions from two very different candidates. When former President Trump declared his crusade to eliminate taxes on tips earlier this summer, the headline from CBS News read, “Trump proposal to exempt tips from taxes could cost $250 billion.” But when Harris offered her endorsement for the effort, CBS reported, “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” In other words, Trump is hellbent on ginning up the federal deficit as a consequence of political patronage, while Harris is a determined fighter for the service worker. Here is NBC’s headline on Trump’s announcement: “Ending tips taxes? Restaurant workers and advocates say it’s a low priority.” And here was the headline from NBC this month: “Harris says she supports eliminating federal taxes on tips.” One is not like the other. Newsweek, meanwhile, rebranded Trump’s tax proposal as “Kamala Harris’ tax proposal.”

An idea is only as good as the person who steals it...