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Harris backs ending taxes on tips, echoing Trump proposal
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.
It’s a proposal her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has touted all summer in an effort to win over tipped workers. Campaigning in Las Vegas on Saturday with running mate Gov. Tim Walz, Harris pledged to work to eliminate federal taxes on tips earned by restaurant employees and other service industry workers.
“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,” Harris said in Nevada.
It may be one of the few policies on which Harris and Trump agree, as they spend the next three months persuading voters to support their vision for America’s future. The president doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally exempt tips from federal taxes — that’s something Congress would need to pass in order for the president to sign.
The Culinary Union, which represents 60,0000 hospitality workers in Nevada, praised Harris for the policy announcement.
“Vice-President Kamala Harris acknowledged the hard working men and women of the hospitality industry and committed tonight in Las Vegas to raise the minimum wage across the country and fight to end taxes on tips once elected as the next President of the United States of America,” the union said in a statement.
Trump first announced his support of eliminating taxes on tips in June, and has reiterated the stance frequently at rallies. The former president, in response to Harris’ platform announcement over the weekend, called her a “COPYCAT.” But Trump isn’t the first politician to propose eliminating federal taxes on tips.
As early as 2007, former Rep. Ron Paul introduced legislation in the House to exempt tips from both federal income and payroll taxes, to no avail. And former Republican Rep. Phil Crane of Illinois also called to eliminate federal taxes on tips in the 1980s, according to contemporary news reports kept by the Government Publishing Office and highlighted by the Huffington Post.
Three weeks after President Biden dropped out of the race for president, Harris has offered little in the way of new policy proposals or platforms to distinguish her campaign from Mr. Biden’s. But with the Democratic National Convention slated to begin in one week, more proposals could be forthcoming.
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STOCKHOLM – Two researchers working in Massachusetts have been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.
MicroRNA
Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were honored Monday for their discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.
The Nobel Assembly said that their discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”
Steffen Trumpf/picture alliance via Getty Images
Victor Ambros
Ambrose performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University.
He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Ambrose was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979.
Gary Ruvkun
Ruvkin’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.
Ruvkin was born in Berkeley, California. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1982.
Nobel Prizes
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.
The prize carries a cash award of $1 million from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Associated Press writers Daniel Niemann and Mike Corder contributed to this report.
The mayor of a city in southern Mexico has been murdered less than a week after taking office, authorities said Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks on politicians in the violence-plagued Latin American country.
The killing of Chilpancingo mayor Alejandro Arcos “fills us with indignation,” Guerrero state governor Evelyn Salgado wrote on social media, without providing further details of the circumstances.
Local media reported that Arcos was decapitated, but there has been no official confirmation.
Reuters reported that photos circulating on WhatsApp showed a severed head on top of what appeared to be Arcos’ vehicle, but the news agency could not independently verify the photos’ authenticity.
JESUS GUERRERO/AFP via Getty Images
Arcos was elected in June representing an opposition coalition that included the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which denounced his killing as a “cowardly crime” and called for justice.
“Enough of violence and impunity! The people of Guerrero do not deserve to live in fear,” it said on X.
His murder came days after the killing of another city official, Francisco Tapia, according to PRI president Alejandro Moreno.
“They had been in office for less than a week. Young and honest officials who sought progress for their community,” Moreno said on X.
Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, has endured years of violence linked to turf wars between cartels fighting for control of drug production and trafficking.
Last year, 1,890 murders were recorded in the state, which is home to the beachside resort city of Acapulco, a former playground of the rich and famous now blighted by crime. Guerrero is among six states in Mexico that the U.S. State Department advises Americans to completely avoid, citing crime and violence.
Across Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands have gone missing in a spiral of violence since the government deployed the army to combat drug trafficking in 2006.
Politicians, particularly at the local level, frequently fall victim to bloodshed connected to corruption and the multibillion-dollar drugs trade.
Tackling the cartel violence that makes murder and kidnapping a daily occurrence in Mexico is among the major challenges facing Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman president.
Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City who was sworn in on October 1, has pledged to stick to her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to tackle crime at its roots.
She is due to unveil her security plan on Tuesday.
At least 24 politicians were murdered during a particularly violent electoral process leading up to the June election that the key ruling party figure won by a landslide, according to official figures.
In June, at least three politicians in Guerrero were killed. Acacio Flores, who represents Malinaltepec, was killed just days after the killing of Salvador Villalba Flores, another mayor from Guerrero state elected in June 2 polls. Earlier in the month, a local councilwoman was gunned down as she was leaving her home in Guerrero.
Her murder came a few days after the mayor of a town in western Mexico and her bodyguard were killed outside of a gym, just hours after Sheinbaum won the presidency.
