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Reducing taxes on blue collar work doesn't increase it's value, though it does reduce its price. The working of the market should result in wages falling as a result, though various distortions like minimum wage and required time-and-a-half may change that. Sans gaming, the undesirable consequence I'd be most sure of is that hiring fewer employees and working them longer would become even more popular than it already is, both among employees (the ones still working) and employers.
If this proposal were to pass (and I give it a big fat zero chance), gaming would of course be extreme. Give me a contract that guarantees me 41 hours a week and pays me almost all the money in the 41st hour please.
Both Harris's proposals and Trump's are absolutely terrible this time around. Tariffs are bad, tax-free tips are stupid, and this tax-free overtime idea would be be a horror show of distortion and revenue loss if passed, which it won't be. On the other side, Harris's increased tax proposals and unrealized gains tax are terrible and have a better chance of being passed. Price controls are even worse and perhaps like Nixon she could do them by executive order. So Harris is still worse but Trump is closing that gap.
In a nutshell, they require massive periodic selloffs of stocks to pay for, which will have tons of second order effects. That in addition to the fact that the government already pulls in enough tax money to piss down the drain/burn in a giant fire, it doesn't need more.
If you wanted to target buy-borrow-die, you can just eliminate the step-up basis. Much simpler and less distortionary than unrealized gains taxes.
And taxing unrealized gains has also been avoided since 1913.
It doesn’t follow that unrealized capital gains is good just because you can’t get your preferred option. But if the point is “it’s hard to remove the step up on death” presumably that’s easier compared to a whole new idea of “let’s tax unrealized gains.” The former is something that most people can grok. The latter is confiscatory.
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