It started with one of Donald Trump’s whims: exempting tip income from federal taxes. As is often the case with his “policy” proposals, this one seems like one of those things that often pop into his head that he promptly blurts out because they sound good. He claims he got the idea from a waitress in Nevada, who said it would win her vote.

Unlike many of his proposals, though, this one was quickly copied by Kamala Harris. Usually “bipartisan” is a cover for either some imperial venture or austerity scheme, but in this case, it’s just loopy and sensationalist. Not coincidentally, both endorsements came in Nevada, whose casinos employ lots of waitstaff, a rich source of votes.

Doubtless servers need some economic help. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that their annual earnings are just under $32,000, putting them a third below the national average. Under current federal law, employers are required to pay tipped workers a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, less than a third the current federal minimum of $7.25 and about where the overall federal minimum was in 1975. State minimum wages are often higher; Nevada has eliminated the tipped subminimum.

While servers account for much of the tipped worker population, they’re not the only ones — hairdressers are another. But add them all together and you still get a tiny sliver of employment. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that there were four million tipped workers, 2.5% of total employment, in 2023. They’re a minority even among the low-waged — just 5% of the lowest paid quarter of the workforce. And a third earn so little that they’re already not paying any income tax. (They mostly pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, though; in 2021, 43% of taxpayers paid income tax, compared with 75% for Social Security taxes.)

Trump apparently would also excuse tipped workers from Social Security taxes (details are never his strong point), but Harris wouldn’t. If they were, that could make for a very impoverished retirement, since benefits are currently based on taxable earnings. Harris would cap the tax exemption at $75,000; Trump hasn’t mentioned a cap. In any case, it’s not very meaningful. Servers at high-end restaurants can earn six-figure incomes, but they’re a very small minority of the field; according to the BLS, servers at the ninetieth percentile of earnings (meaning they earn more than 90 percent of their occupational peers) make $60,100 a year, half the national average at the same ranking. So Harris’s cap is almost purely performative, an attempt to make a dumb policy look egalitarian.

The fiscal hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimate Trump’s proposal would cost $20 billion a year over the next decade; Harris’s, about $15 billion. Though those are large numbers, by the standards of the federal budget, they’re relatively minor.

Congress has begun to act on these proposals, though it’s hard to figure out how seriously to take them. In June, a quartet of Republican senators introduced a bill to turn Trump’s improvisation into law that would exempt tipped workers only from income taxes; a Republican counterpart bill in the House, cosponsored by the irrepressible Matt Gaetz, would exempt them from Social Security taxes as well. Meanwhile, a Nevada Democrat, Steven Horsford, has introduced a bill in the House that would not only exempt tips from income tax, but it would also eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers.

Why one particular subset of the low-paid should be singled out for special treatment makes little sense outside the electoral realm. Cashiers and fast-food workers, who together account for three times as many workers as servers, make less, as do, scandalously, childcare workers. If servers are exempted, why not dishwashers, who make less than tipped waitstaff?

In another generous moment, Trump suggested exempting overtime pay from federal taxes. That would have a serious fiscal effect, though the lack of detail makes it hard to put an accurate price tag on it. The Tax Foundation puts the cost at $68 billion a year over the next decade, or over $100 billion if Social Security taxes were included.

Tipping is an almost entirely American practice. Years ago, on a visit to Amsterdam for a conference, as we were dividing up the bill for a post-session dinner, I asked what the local tipping practice was. A Dutch attendee set me straight: “Tip? That’s a barbaric American practice. We pay our restaurant workers well.” We in the United States don’t.

There’s an interesting history to why, nicely reviewed for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) by Nina Mast. As with so much in American life, the full history goes back to slavery, or, more precisely, the period just after Emancipation. Former slaves often found employment in food service and other service jobs, but, as Mast puts it, “instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services.”

The practice was adopted and encouraged by the restaurant industry, through the National Restaurant Association (NRA), founded in 1919. The organization sometimes called “the other NRA” first persuaded Congress to exempt tipped workers from minimum wage laws entirely when they were first passed in 1938 and later created the tipped subminimum. EPI’s work shows that the poverty rate among tipped workers — disproportionately non-white, foreign-born, and female — is over twice that of non-tipped workers.

Despite the frivolity of Trump’s proposal and Harris’s adoption of it, there’s no question servers and other tipped workers deserve lots better pay. But for that, the workers need unions and better laws, not gimmicky gestures.