DoorDash Grandma doesn’t need to save 4 cents on taxes, she needs a living wage

In 1974, I made $1.90 an hour working at the Burger King on Skokie Road in Highland Park, Illinois. The only expenses I had were buying a pair of ugly black shoes and even more ugly black polyester pants. I used my parents’ car to drive to work, so they paid for gas and insurance.

That $1.90 is equivalent to about $13 an hour today, which, sadly, is about the average wage for a successful DoorDash driver. In other words, in the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, the person delivering your Thursday night takeout is worse off than I was in 1974, what with paying for gas and insurance, and to say nothing of the genuine danger involved in delivering food at 2 in the morning — regardless of neighborhood. The worst thing I had to worry about was mopping up vomit in the restroom; that I could be robbed, shot or raped was inconceivable.

So how did we get to the point where President Trump thinks he can score political points with the DoorDash Grandma foolishness? Trump, if he really wants to be the savior of the working class, shouldn’t worry about taxing Granny’s $4 tip (based on DoorDash averages); that’s 4 cents, since Granny is probably in the lowest tax bracket. Which is why she is driving for DoorDash after all, yes?

Instead, Trump could try to fix a problem that has been getting steadily worse for everyone in food service since I worked at Burger King. Jobs that used to be a summer gig for high school students are now central to the post-modern economy, used by working people to support their families – and, somehow, on the 2026 equivalent of what I made so I could afford to take a girl to a movie. Is it any wonder so many of them have to have second and third jobs? Even the “good” jobs, like a lead Starbucks barista, pay about the same $13 an hour. 

Ironically, there has been a fair amount of debate around this subject over the past decade or so, and the Federal Reserve — hardly a bastion of woke commie pinko radical lefties — reports that the net worth of America’s top 1% possessed almost one-third of total U.S. wealth in the third quarter of 2025, setting a record. The bottom 50% of Americans, no doubt including the DoorDash Grandma, accounted for just 2.5% of total net wealth. 

And if that’s not enough, there’s an economic statistic called the Gini Index, which measures income inequality and illuminates the problem in a way no politically motivated video can. The lower the Gini number, the less income inequality exists; the higher the Gini number, the more income is concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest people in the country. In 1974, when I worked at Burger King, the Gini number was 35.5, about as low as it has been in the past 50 years. In 2024, it was 41.8, the highest level in the past 50 years. In other words, the rich have gotten richer since then, and the rest of us have muddled along, wondering why it’s so hard to get a paycheck ahead. 

So saving the DoorDash Grandma 4 cents on her income tax isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference as long as she and the rest of the working class are earning 1974 wages. It’s all about getting a piece of the pie, to quote Randy Newman. And that’s something no one in Washington or Austin seems the least bit interested in.

In all of the talk about the various crises facing the restaurant business, and which have been well documented on these pages, there’s one question no one has been able to answer. Is it any wonder restaurants have trouble keeping good employees when the employees can’t afford to work for them?