Every four years, the just-toss-an-idea-out-there phase of the presidential race precedes the serious campaigning that starts after Labor Day.

The flavor of the moment is the idea of exempting tips from federal taxes. Donald Trump proposed it during an appearance in June in Las Vegas (home to a lot of restaurant and hotel workers who depend on tips).

Kamala Harris offered her version a few days ago during a rally of her own, also in Las Vegas. That prompted Trump to whine on social media that she had poached his idea.

Are you tired of this yet?

Hang on, because there’s more to say, starting with the fact that a tax exemption for tips on its own won’t do much good for the many low-income workers who count tips as an important part of their income.

Second, this is hardly a new idea — it has been kicking around the political world since at least the 1980s. California exempted tips from state tax (with some conditions) in 2015.

A tax exemption for tips is a crowd-pleaser, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Trump’s version, and a bill introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) to put meat on its bones, are half-baked.

Harris paired hers with a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage, which is a much better policy.

If all this jockeying is the two parties vying to be more family-friendly, the crown goes to the Democrats, hands down.

Let’s place the issue under a microscope.

Since Trump hasn’t given any details, we have to use the Cruz/Donalds No Tax on Tips Act as a signpost for the GOP approach. The measure exempts tips from federal income tax, but not from the payroll tax that funds Social Security and part of Medicare. It applies only to households that pay federal income taxes — it’s not refundable, meaning that it doesn’t provide any benefit to households whose income is so low they don’t owe federal taxes.

That leaves out all but “a small sliver” of American workers, according to economist Ernie Tedeschi of the Yale Budget Lab. He counts the number of workers in traditional tipped occupations, including wait staff, barbers and hairdressers, at about 4 million, or just 2.5% of all workers.

“A meaningful share of tipped workers already pay zero federal income tax,” Tedeschi notes.

U.S. census data drive home his point: More than a third of tipped workers earned so little in 2022 that they owed no federal income tax. In other words, they’d receive zero benefit from the Republican act.

Another flaw of the bill is its lack of guardrails to ensure that only low-income tipped workers receive its benefits. Nowhere in the three-page measure are tips defined, nor is there a phase-out of the tax break based on income. This raises the possibility that higher-income households could game the system by defining some of their earnings as tips and pocketing the deduction.

Nothing would “prevent high-income professionals such as hedge fund managers from shifting their compensation to a tax-free tipping model,” observes Brendan Duke of the liberal Center for American Progress.

That mention of “hedge fund managers” shows that the folks at CAP know how their audience would react to another giveaway to plutocrats, but it’s hard to deny that the wealthy are masters of exploiting any tax break that could conceivably save them money.

The biggest problem with the Republican approach is that it operates in a vacuum, as if exempting tips from income tax is all that needs to be done to vest the GOP with pro-family cred. It’s not. Far more gains would be achieved by extending enhancements to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit that were enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021.

The EITC and Child Tax Credit enhancements expired at the end of 2021. Efforts by the Biden White House and its Democratic allies on Capitol Hill to extend them failed, due mostly to Republican opposition. Under the Rescue Plan, the child tax credit was increased to an annual $3,000 per child ($3,600 for children under age 6), from $2,000 per child. The measure raised the maximum age of children eligible for the credit to 17 from 16.

Even more important, the credit was made fully refundable, meaning that it went to families regardless of whether or how much they paid in federal income taxes. The American Rescue Plan also eliminated the preexisting program’s work incentives, which reduced the credit for lower-income families. When the enhancements expired, the child credit fell back to $2,000 per child and reduced the refundable portion to $1,700.

As CAP calculates, many of the low-income households that would receive nothing from the No Tax on Tips Act — a single parent with one child, living on $24,000 income mostly from tips, a student working part-time or a married couple earning less than $30,000 — would receive benefits of up to $2,600 from restoration of the American Rescue Plan credits.

The enhanced Child Tax Credit reduced the child poverty rate by about 30%, keeping as many as 3.7 million children out of poverty by the end of 2021. When the enhancements expired in January, the child poverty rate spiked to 17% from 12.1%, plunging 3.7 million children back under the poverty line. The impact was much worse on Black, Latino and Asian children than on white ones.

In other words, if the Republicans wished to be pro-family really, not just rhetorically, they would have clamored to extend the credits.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, whose mouth writes checks his campaign can’t cash, says he’s in favor of the child tax credit and even wants to raise it as high as $5,000 per child. Couple of problems here: First, he surely knows that his Republican colleagues in Congress would never support such a large grant to families, and second, when a more modest increase came up to the Senate floor two weeks ago, Vance didn’t even show up to vote.

How about Harris’ proposal?

What she said in Las Vegas was this: “We will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” Nestled within that statement are two very important distinctions from the Trump or Republican proposal.

First is a raise in the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Had the minimum kept pace with inflation, it would be $10.79 today. In seven states, the federal wage applies — five that have not enacted a minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee) and two (Georgia and Wyoming) where the state minimum is lower than $7.25, meaning that the federal wage is the law.

Harris also specified service and hospitality workers, which obviously means she would exclude professionals gaming the law. Whether she would do so by phasing out the benefit by income or specifically identifying eligible occupations isn’t clear.

Despite her careful phrasing, conservative commentators and not a few actual journalistic organizations fell into the trap of treating Harris’ proposal as a copycat of Trump’s.

The right-wing pundit Mary Katherine Ham, whose determination to tell it like it is was hampered by her lack of knowledge, tweeted that if Harris is “just gonna copy and paste Trump’s site, she doesn’t need another week or two to debut it.”

Obviously, if Ham spent two minutes examining the proposals, she wouldn’t have made this claim. But her error matched those of, for example, CBS News, which reported in headline syntax that Harris was “echoing Trump proposal.”

The distinction was also lost on the Wall Street Journal, which accused Harris of “borrowing a Trump idea.” Never mind that the idea wasn’t Trump’s in the first place. The Times, I’m sorry to say, picked up an Associated Press account that described Harris as “echoing a pledge that her opponent, Republican Donald Trump, has made, and marking a rare instance of political overlap from both sides.”

Budget deficit hawks have also weighed in. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that is an offspring of the late hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, wrung its hands over the potential cost of Harris’ plan, based on a conjecture that she would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The committee estimated that, combined with an income tax exemption, her plan would cost the federal government as much as $200 billion over 10 years. Is that a lot?

The Congressional Budget Office projects that annual federal budgets will total about $19.6 trillion over the next 10 years, making the cost of the minimum wage and tip exemption come to about 1% of federal outlays during that time.

You make the call. Two of the most expensive tax breaks in federal law are the exemptions for contributions and earnings for pension and individual retirement accounts, and the preferential tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Both disproportionately benefit the wealthy. Combined, they come to $680 billion a year; the minimum wage increase and tip exemption would cost an average $20 billion a year.

Some people might think that an important goal of the federal government should be providing for the most vulnerable members of society. The current system, especially after a massive tax break was enacted by the Republicans and signed by Trump in 2017, is heavily skewed toward comforting the wealthy.

If the parties and their candidates want to play the pro-family card, one can’t really blame them for seizing on a policy that sounds great on TV. Only one of the parties has gone beyond a tax exemption on tips and has favored truly comprehensive pro-family policies. Can you see which one?

About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.

The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.

“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X.

The lawsuit was reported by Bloomberg Law.

Last week, a purported member of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking forum that they were offering “the full NPD database,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.

National Public Data didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor has it formally notified people about the alleged breach. It has, however, been telling people who contacted it via email that “we are aware of certain third-party claims about consumer data and are investigating these issues.”

In that email, the company also said that it had “purged the entire database, as a whole, of any and all entries, essentially opting everyone out.” As a result, it said, it has deleted any “non-public personal information” about people, although it added, “We may be required to retain certain records to comply with legal obligations.”

Several news outlets that focus on cybersecurity have looked at portions of the data Felice offered and said they appear to be real people’s actual information. If the leaked material is it what it’s claimed to be, here are some of the risks posed and the steps you can take to protect yourself.

The threat of ID theft

The leak purports to provide much of the information that banks, insurance companies and service providers seek when creating accounts — and when granting a request to change the password on an existing account.

A few key pieces appeared to be missing from the hackers’ haul. One is email addresses, which many people use to log on to services. Another is driver’s license or passport photos, which some governmental agencies rely on to verify identities.

Still, Murray of PIRG said that bad actors could do “all kinds of things” with the leaked information, the most worrisome probably being to try to take over someone’s accounts — including those associated with their bank, investments, insurance policies and email. With your name, Social Security number, date of birth and mailing address, a fraudster could create fake accounts in your name or try to talk someone into resetting the password on one of your existing accounts.

“For somebody who’s really suave at it,” Murray said, “the possibilities are really endless.”

It’s also possible that criminals could use information from previous data breaches to add email addresses to the data from the reported National Public Data leak. Armed with all that, Murray said, “you can cause all kinds of chaos, commit all kinds of crimes, steal all kinds of money.”

How to protect yourself

Data breaches have been so common over the years, some security experts say sensitive information about you is almost certainly available in the dark corners of the internet. And there are a lot of people capable of finding it; VPNRanks, a website that rates virtual private network services, estimates that 5 million people a day will access the dark web through the anonymizing TOR browser, although only a portion of them will be up to no good.

If you suspect that your Social Security number or other important identifying information about you has been leaked, experts say you should put a freeze on your credit files at the three major credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. You can do so for free, and it will prevent criminals from taking out loans, signing up for credit cards and opening financial accounts under your name. The catch is that you’ll need to remember to lift the freeze temporarily if you are obtaining or applying for something that requires a credit check.

Placing a freeze can be done online or by phone, working with each credit bureau individually. PIRG cautions never to do so in response to an unsolicited email or text purporting to be from one of the credit agencies — such a message is probably the work of a scammer trying to dupe you into revealing sensitive personal information.

For more details, check out PIRG’s step-by-step guide to credit freezes.

You can also sign up for a service that monitors your accounts and the dark web to guard against identity theft, typically for a fee. If your data is exposed in a breach, the company whose network was breached will often provide one of these services for free for a year or more.

As important as these steps are to stop people from opening new accounts in your name, they aren’t much help protecting your existing accounts. Oddly enough, those accounts are especially vulnerable to identity thieves if you haven’t signed up for online access to them, Murray said — that’s because it’s easier for thieves to create a login and password while pretending to be you than it is for them to crack your existing login and password.

Of course, having strong passwords that are different for every service and changed periodically helps. Password manager apps offer a simple way to create and keep track of passwords by storing them in the cloud, essentially requiring you to remember one master password instead of dozens of long and unpronounceable ones. These are available both for free (such as Apple’s iCloud Keychain) and for a fee.

Beyond that, experts say it’s extremely important to sign up for two-factor authentication. That adds another layer of security on top of your login and password. The second factor is usually something sent or linked to your phone, such as a text message; a more secure approach is to use an authenticator app, which will keep you secure even if your phone number is hijacked by scammers.

Yes, scammers can hijack your phone number through techniques called SIM swaps and port-out fraud, causing more identity-theft nightmares. To protect you on that front, AT&T allows you to create a passcode restricting access to your account; T-Mobile offers optional protection against your phone number being switched to a new device, and Verizon automatically blocks SIM swaps by shutting down both the new device and the existing one until the account holder weighs in with the existing device.

Your worst enemy may be you

As much or more than hacked data, scammers also rely on people to reveal sensitive information about themselves. One common tactic is to pose as your bank, employer, phone company or other service provider with whom you’ve done business and then try to hook you with a text or email message.

Banks, for example, routinely tell customers that they will not ask for their account information by phone. Nevertheless, scammers have coaxed victims into providing their account numbers, logins and passwords by posing as bank security officers trying to stop an unauthorized withdrawal or some other supposedly urgent threat.

People may even get an official-looking email purportedly from National Public Data, offering to help them deal with the reported leak, Murray said. “It’s not going to be NPD trying to help. It’s going to be some bad guy overseas” trying to con them out of sensitive information, she said.

It’s a good rule of thumb never to click on a link or call a phone number in an unsolicited text or email. If the message warns about fraud on your account and you don’t want to simply ignore it, look up the phone number for that company’s fraud department (it’s on the back of your debit and credit cards) and call for guidance.

“These bad guys, this is what they do for a living,” Murray said. They might send out tens of thousands of queries and get only one response, but that response could net them $10,000 from an unwitting victim. “Ten thousand dollars in one day for having one hit with one victim, that’s a pretty good return on investment,” she said. “That’s what motivates them.”

LL Flooring, the flooring retailer formerly known as Lumber Liquidators, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will close about a quarter of its locations nationwide, the company announced Sunday.

Eleven of the 94 locations marked for closure are in California, including stores in Torrance, Rancho Cucamonga and Fresno. The company said stores being shuttered will remain open throughout the closing process.

A major retailer in home improvement, LL Flooring offers customers a wide range of flooring products and advertises a seamless shopping experience and expert guidance. The company was founded in 1993 as Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc. but changed its name in 2022.

In an open letter to customers, LL Flooring said it is seeking a buyer for its remaining stores and anticipates a sale of the business will be completed by the end of September. The company said it has been marketing its business to potential buyers for more than a year.

About 300 locations across the country and LL Flooring’s online platform will remain open as the company continues to search for a buyer.

The retailer, which is carrying nearly $110 million in long-term debt, said consumer spending on home improvement projects declined during the COVID-19 pandemic as home sales dropped and interest rates rose.

“After comprehensive efforts to enhance our liquidity position in a challenging macro environment, a determination was made that initiating this Chapter 11 process is the best path forward for the company,” Chief Executive and President Charles Tyson said.

“Today’s step is intended to provide LL Flooring with additional time and financial flexibility as we reduce our physical footprint and close certain stores while pursuing a going-concern sale of the rest of our business,” he said.

The company has received $130 million in financing from a group of existing bank lenders led by Bank of America, which it will use to fund its operations during bankruptcy.

Bloomberg contributed to this report