The Chicago Tribune on how Trump’s election-year sweeteners could bring sour results:

At the Republican National Convention, we heard Donald Trump discuss an encounter with a Nevada waitress.

The swing-state server told her customer, the former president and Republican presidential nominee, of the onerous tax burden she felt from having to pay federal income tax on her tipped income.

There are some 300,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas, many of whom receive tips. Many electoral roads to the presidency depend on winning Nevada. Trump is a savvy politician. A charitable view was that he was empathetic to a hardworking American in a restaurant; a less charitable view was that he saw a political opportunity.

Either way, it’s clear that the two major political parties in America have in many ways flipped. The Democrats, once the FDR-forged party of the working class, now have educated elites as their core constituency, which explains why President Joe Biden fought so hard to forgive student loans even for those making six-figure incomes. By contrast, the Republicans badly need to appeal to blue-collar and lower-income voters, now their dominant group of supporters, especially in crucial states like Nevada, where they are the ones serving the vacationing Democrats. Ergo, Trump’s pledge to nix the taxing of their tips.

The waitress, he has said, was glad to hear this news. No doubt.

But it’s a terrible idea.

Imagine this scenario. A real estate agent offers to sell your house for 4% if you agree to “tip” your agent another 0.75% at the end of the deal and let him or her avoid taxes. Any business that has automatic gratuities (and there are many) would be upping their percentages and “lowering” their prices. Those tips would be showing up everywhere as people figured out how to manipulate the system.

Not only would it cost the treasury $250 billion, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, it’s fundamentally unfair.

People pay taxes on wages, commissions, royalties, rental property, capital gains, side jobs, business income, alimony payments, gambling winnings, court awards, dividends, gig work, stuff they sell online, retirement plan distributions, prizes and any number of other categories dreamed up by the IRS. We’ve long been for people keeping as much of their hard-earned money as possible. But tipped employees can’t get some special deal. It’s wildly unfair, since cash tips already are easy to hide from the IRS.

But that’s just one of Trump’s problem-plagued tax giveaways. Another is his proposal to stop taxing Social Security benefits.

This one better passes the test of reasonableness. Democrats in Illinois, for example, have supported the state’s very popular policy not to tax retirement income at the state level. But the cost of Trump’s proposal would be astronomical. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the promise would reduce revenues by about $1.8 trillion between 2026 and 2035.

Presently, individuals earning less than $25,000 (and couples less than $32,000) of “combined income” don’t pay tax on their Social Security benefits. Above that threshold, 50% of the benefit is taxable with the money going to the Social Security Trust Fund. Once couples get above $44,000, another 35% becomes taxable, with that money going to the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. Everyone knows that these safety net programs are already running out of money; removing at least $94 billion in revenue would make the situation worse.