ARLINGTON, Virginia — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Breitbart News exclusively on Labor Day that President Donald Trump’s fulfilled “no tax on tips” campaign promise will significantly help American workers like the wait staff at the diner he visited on Monday.
Bessent sat with Breitbart News for nearly half an hour in a booth at Metro 29 Diner just outside the nation’s capital here on Monday morning as part of a multi-stop tour he took of restaurants and bars on Labor Day to highlight how Trump’s agenda is delivering for Main Street to level the playing field with financial elites in the country.
“It’s part of the president’s agenda and it’s what I call parallel prosperity. Wall Street has done great. Upper income taxpayers and business have done great. Now, Main Street and working Americans are going to do great,” Bessent said. “It’s part of what you said, which is when the One Big Beautiful Bill became One Big Beautiful Law, the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, and interest deductibility of auto loans for new cars that are made in the U.S.”
The Treasury Department this week will roll out specific profession-by-profession and industry-by-industry guidance on the no tax on tips part of the One Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law back in July. A draft copy of the document that Bessent’s staff provided to Breitbart News ahead of the interview shows dozens of pages of professions that the government deems worthy of the tips exemption of up to $25,000 from federal taxes for tipped workers.
“It’s very wide-ranging and the good news is we have a lot of data,” Bessent said. “People aren’t going to be able to game the system… It’s the president delivering for working Americans and we’ve had this affordability crisis. There are two ways to solve that. One, we are bending the curve on inflation and getting that under control and then we are going to be laser focused on affordability this fall with solutions, especially on housing. But two is to grow wages for working Americans and this is a big step.”
A lot of American workers, Bessent said, got screwed under now former President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump, he said, is trying to fix it and level the playing field.
“You and I have talked about it—a lot of them really got [screwed] under the Biden administration. It was a wipeout for the bottom 50 percent of wage earners,” Bessent said.
Asked about what advice he would have for workers who benefit from the extra cash thanks to Trump and the Republicans, Bessent said pay down any debt and then start saving.
“First thing would be, if you have any high-cost debt, pay that down,” Bessent said. “That’s the best thing to do. Then, you can start thinking about a rainy-day fund or saving up or creating a cash cushion.”
The goal with all of these efforts, the president’s top financial adviser said, is to “reward work.”
“Again, the main thing is to reward work,” Bessent said. “We want to reward hardworking Americans. So, on tips it’s easy. The first $25,000 is tax exempt. Then, on overtime, the more hours you work, the more you make.”
Asked about how he and Trump are focused on what he calls “parallel prosperity” for Main Street getting some success after Wall Street has done so well before, Bessent said it’s time for working class Americans to have “some catch-up here.”
“I want to stress, I call it parallel prosperity, so they’re not mutually exclusive,” Bessent said. “It’s just time for Main Street to do well again too. There does need to be some catch-up here. What we saw under President Trump’s first term was working Americans did better than the top 10 percent—the bottom 50 percent of households saw a bigger increase in household net worth than the top 10 percent did. Hourly workers did better than supervisory workers. We’re going to bring that back. With these high-paying manufacturing jobs we’re bringing back, with these commitments from these factories, it is unbelievable and unprecedented so we will see a construction boom. Then the manufacturing jobs that will populate all these jobs across the country, they’re going everywhere. They’re also going to the places where the state and local governments cooperate on the permitting side and on the energy side, so I hope there won’t be states and cities left out because they have bad local and state officials.”
Since this interview was filmed over breakfast in a diner, Breitbart News then asked Bessent about the price of eggs–which has come down significantly since the beginning of the administration–Bessent told a story of how one of his cousins back in South Carolina told him about how egg surcharges on the menu at a restaurant they frequent has gone away.
“One of my cousins in South Carolina sent me something from a diner slash restaurant there and they had a notice back in June or July that they have taken off the egg surcharge,” Bessent said. “The egg surcharge is gone. President Trump and this administration is solutions-oriented. A lot of this is the mess we inherited. Beef prices are high now, and we are going to work on that—but that’s been a five-year problem in the making. Do I wish I could snap my fingers and end it overnight? Yes. But what can we do? Brooke Rollins over at the Department of Agriculture is working every day on these things and working with our farmers and working with our ranchers.”
Speaking of his roots in South Carolina, Bessent also told Breitbart News about how he worked at a restaurant called Hardwick’s Cafeteria when he was 9 years old–his first job–bussing tables and working in part for tips. That’s what makes the president’s fulfilled promise so important and personal to him.
“We found a photo of it,” Bessent said. “I was a busboy. I would help, also help carry people’s trays from the cash register stand to the table and I would get tips. I’ve been getting tip income since I was 9 years old. I also had a second job on the beach setting up beach chairs and umbrellas—that was also a tipped job too. So no tax on tips means a lot to me.”
Asked for his advice to young people in America just starting out in their careers on what they should do to reach the levels of success he has, he said “whatever it takes.”
“Number one, whatever it takes—whatever it takes,” Bessent said. “The reason I started working when I was 9 was my dad had financial difficulties and I could have sat at home and moped or I just went out—I didn’t tell my parents—but I went out and got a job. My first job in New York was an internship.”
Gas prices are down this Labor Day weekend as well, and Bessent said it is a huge part of the president’s vision for the economy as it helps with not just gas prices for drivers but also with food and other retail prices as well.
“It’s part of the president’s energy dominance idea that if we look at the many things that went haywire under the Biden administration the cutoff of one of America’s great national advantages—which is the natural resources in crude and natural gas—President Trump is bringing all of that back,” Bessent said. “It’s a combination of energy price and national security—we’re already seeing that at the pump, with gas prices. I get a lot of my anecdotal information from my cousins and one of my cousins was in Daytona, and he said gas was like $1.92 or something. The other thing I want to say is with the energy costs and food costs, a huge amount of food retail is from the trucking component. So, if the transport costs are down, then the retail prices can go lower too.”
Bessent also defended the president’s tariffs after an appellate court ruled against them late last week, arguing that the president is firmly in the right on this–and also that in addition to the emergency with regard to fentanyl deaths there is clearly a looming crisis financially for the nation when it comes to trade deficits that the tariffs are addressing. Bessent argued the president’s actions are akin to somebody actually intervening in housing and mortgage financing in the years before the 2008 financial crisis–rather than just allowing the nation to barrel into another crisis.
“Well, we’ve seen throughout the first Trump administration, but much more in this administration as we’ve come in, as we have plans to help the American people whether it’s closing the border and making America safe again—what an unmitigated success with zero border crossings,” Bessent said. “Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Now, with these tariffs, everyone said there would be massive inflation and that we’d have empty shelves—it’s just the opposite. We saw inflation drop for the first time in several years and my expectation [is] that consumer prices are going to remain under control and start coming down. When we come to the court ruling, what we’ve seen from these lower court judges is there’s a lot of forum shopping—not as much with the tariffs, but this is a national emergency. It is an emergency and if we think about it there are two components. First of all, there is a fentanyl component. I’m happy to share with you a letter that I got from a friend of mine whose daughter died from a fentanyl overdose. He was outraged that the court struck down the fentanyl tariffs because if that’s not an emergency—100,000 to 200,000 Americans have died, and using tariffs as leverage to stop China, Mexico, and Canada from not helping stem the transport of fentanyl into America—then what is an emergency? Then, two, with the other tariffs, it is the idea of a tipping point. So everyone says we’ve had these trade deficits for a long time—sure we have. But in economics, there is the thought of a tipping point—think of the financial crisis. What if someone had stepped in in 2005 and 2006 and said we are going to get housing and mortgage finance under control? We have had these gigantic trade deficits and I tell you they were heading toward financial ruin. President Trump has stepped in before we hit the financial calamity—that’s why this is an emergency.”
Bessent said he’s confident the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the appellate court ruling, and that he is working on a brief on Monday explaining this emergency and the need for the president’s tariffs.
“I am actually working on another brief today talking about this idea of how we were at the tipping point; this is an emergency, and we have to—the president has to be allowed to do this,” Bessent said.
Bessent also signaled that he believes the Federal Reserve is getting ready to cut interest rates in September, and that he hopes this is part of a series of coming cuts.
“A couple of things, I just like to talk about the mistakes the Fed has made not the ones they are going to make,” Bessent said. “But I believe we are getting the signals from Chair Powell, from market pricing, that we are going to get a rate cut in September. I think we’ve seen from Governor Waller that he believes there could be a series of rate cuts–we’ve seen that from Governor Bowman. There is some AI that looks at ‘Fed Speak’ and what they are saying and it looks like they are adopting a lot more dovish tone here so it looks like we could start moving. We are in a highly restrictive monetary posture right now and it looks like we could start moving away from that.”
Asked what big mistakes the Fed has made under Chairman Jerome Powell, Bessent said the biggest was dismissing inflation in 2022.
“The biggest mistake in the past was the terrible inflation of 2022,” Bessent said. “‘Team Transitory’ kept saying this was all transitory and it’ll go away—well, there’s nothing more transitory than the tariffs. If the prices go up, and they haven’t, it would have been a one-time adjustment but the Fed board were like a deer in the headlights just sort of spouting the conventional wisdom.”
Bessent also said to continue to expect to see Trump’s emissaries like himself out there engaging with the public like he’s doing on Labor Day weekend.
“The cabinet is out there all the time,” Bessent said. “I have traveled a lot. I know Secretary Rollins is on the road all the time. The Labor Secretary, I can’t remember whether she said she’s been in 20 or 30 states–I assume she will soon have been in all 50. Secretary Burgum I bumped into on a flight back from Wyoming—so you had the two of us being on a flight back together. So we’re out there. It’s the only way to understand what’s going on. I’ll tell you: We understand there is an affordability crisis in this country. We had to bend the curve on inflation. We are laser-focused on it. But the only way to do it is to get out and talk to people. What we are not going to do is what the Biden people did and talk down to the American people and say this is just a vibe session and that you don’t understand how good you have it and it’s great. We understand that we were left with a mess and everyday working Americans are hurting and we’re going to be out there talking about how we’re going to fix it and then fixing it. Then to your point about the One Big Beautiful Bill—there’s so many parts of it that we want Americans to understand this. I was out west last week and I was at an ice cream stand and I said to the young people behind the counter, ‘How do you feel about no tax on tips?’ They said: ‘There’s no tax on tips?’… They didn’t even know…so we’re out spreading the word.”
The biggest thing Bessent said he continues to hear from ordinary Americans when he travels is continued concerns about affordability in the United States. A lot of the tax relief Americans will get in the One Big Beautiful Bill is going to come back in tax refunds in early 2026, too, so he said that will give people “breathing room” as part of a “refund boom.”
“They’re still reeling from the affordability crisis,” Bessent said. “One of the things that will happen here with the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, lowered or no tax on Social Security is that will come back to most people next year in refunds. Most people are keeping the standard deductions, the deductions that they have, so we’re going to see a refund boom in 2026 which I think will give the American people some breathing room because again the bottom 50 percent of wage earners has gotten killed and if the Fed does start cutting rates the problem is we’ve seen these distributional effects where the lower wage earners are disproportionately hit by the higher rates. They have credit card debt, they have sub-prime auto loans—we’re trying to bring all that down.”
What’s more, wages are on the rise for American workers as well.
“For Americans—and for American citizens. The jobs are going to American citizens, which is very different than under the Biden administration,” Bessent said, stressing the jobs and wage increases are going to American citizens and not to illegal aliens. “There are two ways out of this affordability crisis. One is to get prices down as we’ve talked about—egg prices, gas prices. The other is through real wage increases, like we saw in President Trump’s first term. The wage increases we are seeing right now for working Americans are the biggest that we’ve seen except for President Trump’s first term. I would expect, as we see these commitments to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.—as President Trump always says, if you build it here there are no tariffs.”
As the interview ended when the server at Metro 29 Diner brought out Bessent’s and Breitbart News’s breakfasts, the secretary joked: “I hope I don’t get in trouble with Bobby Kennedy.”
The post Exclusive — Treasury Secretary Bessent in Labor Day ‘No Tax on Tips’ Diner Interview: Time for ‘Parallel Prosperity’ Where ‘Main Street and Working Americans Do Great’ appeared first on Breitbart.
