I recently learned of yet another way the Great Orange Fecal Stain and his supplicants found to transfer money from the non-wealthy into the pockets of the wealthy.
For the past 25 years or so I have earned anywhere from a portion of my living, to all of it, working as a driver. Most of this was delivering pizzas. Some of it was as an Uber driver. Often it was both. I’d joke to my Uber riders that the difference between delivering pizzas and delivering people is that if I missed a turn the pizzas didn’t complain. Usually.
While I loved the actual work of Ubering (I met people from two dozen different countries as well as all over the US, and got to really learn my way around a city I dearly love,) doing so is of course a money losing proposition. I always tell people “You don’t make money driving for Uber, you take equity out of your car and put it in your checking account.” But it did put money in my checking account, and it gave me the flexibility I needed to look after my elderly sister, who was requiring more and more care.
About six weeks into the pandemic I quit Ubering, and shortly afterwards I quit my pizza delivery job. As anyone who worked for tips during that time will tell you, gratuities actually went down...substantially so….as we in the restaurant industry risked our health, our lives, and the health and lives of our loved ones. Then my sister became ill (not with COVID) and I pretty much spent the following year caring for her, while I lived off savings and credit cards.
Following her death this past April I returned to work. It felt so good to be doing something normal. And it felt good to be making some money again. There were many advantages to working for the restaurant I’d driven for the past two decades. For one thing the restaurant was at most five minutes from home. The mileage I put on my car didn’t exceed what one would normally be expected to accumulate per year, because unlike most folks I really didn’t have any commute at all.
But as things returned to semi-normal, the franchise’s owner refused to raise compensation. So I took my labor elsewhere, to a chain about 20 minutes away that pays considerably more. My new employer gives its drivers a reimbursement for the use of our personal vehicle. It’s a flat fee that comes out of (though doesn’t come close to equaling) the delivery charge. That’s right...most folks assume drivers get the delivery charge. We do not. We work for a sub-minimum wage and tips. Fortunately I live in Illinois, a state with a Democratic governor and legislature and if those tips added to the hourly wage don’t equal $12.00 the employer comes up with the difference. This is called a “tip differential.” And yes, if you object to this entire business model and think that tipping should be eliminated and workers paid a living wage, I couldn’t agree more. That’s a topic for another diary.
Out of habit I’ve been keeping track of the mileage I drive every shift, then multiplying it by the IRS’s current mileage deduction, which is 62.5¢ a mile.
And I found that my new employer’s reimbursement often falls short, sometimes far short, of my expenses. Once a week the reimbursement rate is reviewed, and adjusted, dependent on the price of gasoline. And I’m sorry to say that my fellow drivers are…..well let’s just say that our employer is taking advantage of their….ignorance. Because all they think about is gas.
And while gas is certainly the most salient and regular reminder of the cost of using our vehicles, it pales in comparison to the depreciation our cars experience. This makes them worth less at trade-in time (to say nothing of how much sooner we’re going to be forced to trade them in.) Then there is the accelerated maintenance. Oil changes roll around sooner, along with brake jobs. Tires have to be replaced twice as often. And while the price of gas has been dropping recently (until the Saudis decided to repay tRump and his spawn for their fealty...and documents?) the costs of maintenance and repairs has continued to rise.
As a self employed Uber driver I had kept track of every mile I drove, and would deduct that from my taxes. So I was hoping that even though my employer did provide partial reimbursement for use of my car I would be able to deduct that portion they failed to cover. But I wasn’t sure that I could.
Well, it turns out that until fairly recently employees who use their personal vehicles in their jobs could take such a deduction. If your employer provided no reimbursement you could deduct every mile at tax time. If they provided reimbursement that fell short of your actual cost (per the IRS mileage rate,) you could deduct the difference.
And then the reTrumplicans passed what they had the temerity to call the “Tax Relief and Jobs Act” of 2017. And the deduction was eliminated for employees (the self employed can still take it.) Even those folks whose employers provide no reimbursement at all must now suck up the entire cost. In my case I suspect this will amount to the IRS taxing over $1,000 that my employer will report to them as income but which will in fact come out of my own pocket. So not only will I eat a thousand dollars lost income, I’ll pay an additional several hundred dollars in taxes on it.
But of course, the reTrumplicans couldn’t fund their giveaway to their wealthy masters entirely on deficit spending, could they? Nope, they had to fund some of it by picking the pockets of working men and women.