Hello, this is Ron Paul with your weekly update for Monday, February 20th.

The inflation and taxes sold on the American people.

The government's figures also record a .2% decline in real wages in January and a 1.8% decline from a year earlier.

Keep in mind that actual real wage losses have been larger because the government's real wage numbers

are calculated using the government's understated price inflation numbers.

The Federal Reserve caused decline in purchasing power disproportionately harms middle and lower income Americans,

many of whom were already living paycheck to paycheck before the Federal Reserve's unprecedented money creation caused, especially large increases in price inflation.

According to a morning consult survey from June of 2022, price inflation has caused over 40% of U.S. consumers to eat out less.

This obviously reduces the opportunity of waiters staff to earn tips that constitute a significant portion of their incomes.

This loss is in addition to the loss income from during coronavirus scare when many restaurants either closed entirely or only offered take out or delivery service.

The reduction in tip income is not stopping the internal revenue from trying to squeeze more taxes out of waiters and waitresses.

The tax agency has announced this month the creation of the service industry tip compliance agreement.

As the name suggests, the program will allow the tax agency to collect data on tips directly from restaurants instead of relying on employees to report their tips.

This is one of the first initiatives to use some of the $80 billion in additional funding provided to the IRS in last year's budget.

President Biden and other supporters of the legislation said the funds were to enable the IRS to crack down on millionaires and billionaires, those tax cheats.

President Biden and the bureaucrats running the IRS must think there are a lot of waiters and waitresses making billions of dollars in tips.

At the time of the bill's passage, many opponents of increasing the IRS enforcement budget predicted the agency would use the additional funds to target middle and lower income Americans.

After all, unlike wealthier individuals, these Americans cannot afford tax attorneys and accountants to make sure they minimize their tax liability without violating the tax law.

Also, wealthy taxpayers are more likely and able to fight an IRS audit.

In contrast, lower income Americans are more likely to pay whatever the tax agency demands in order to make it go away since they don't have the resources to fight it.

When I was in Congress, I introduced legislation to make tips tax-free.

Tips are a gift provided by customers to show appreciation to servers.

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