Two-thirds of restaurant workers who work for tips earn so little that they don't pay federal income taxes, per a new report parsing data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Why it matters: Last month, former President Trump proposed eliminating taxes on tips — part of his more explicit appeal to the working class — but it's hard to see how that would benefit workers.

• It might even hurt them in the long run.

State of play: Trump didn't specify what taxes he meant to cut. Tipped workers pay payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare and federal income tax.

• One bill, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) after Trump unveiled his tip plan, would eliminate only income taxes on tips.
• Another from House Republicans eliminates income and employment taxes.

Follow the money: The median hourly wage for waiters and waitresses is $15.36 per hour, per 2023 data from the Labor Department. That includes tips.

• Few of these workers are paid for a full 40 hours per week.
• That's according to Alex Morash, director of research at One Fair Wage, an advocacy group for tipped workers that put together the report in conjunction with the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley. As a result, their annual income tends to be very low.

By the numbers: Looking at self-reported income for all kinds of tipped restaurant workers, including servers, bartenders, barbacks and bussing staff, Morash's group found that nearly half earn less than $13,850 — the threshold you have to meet to pay income taxes.

• Roughly two-thirds live in households that don't make the income-tax threshold.

Zoom in: Eliminating the income tax on tips would help higher-earning tipped workers.

• There just aren't that many of them: 95% of tipped workers earn less than $53,000 a year, per the report's analysis.

The big picture "Many of these workers make so little that they will not come close to paying federal income tax under current law and thus would not benefit at all from Trump's proposal," writes Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, in a post about Trump's proposal.

• Eliminating the payroll tax for tipped workers could give them a little paycheck boost.
• But down the road that means less money set aside for Social Security benefits — "no tax payments, no benefits," Gleckman writes.

Zoom out: The federal minimum wage for tipped workers has been stuck at $2.13 an hour since 1991.

• Advocates for low-wage earners have been fighting to get rid of this subminimum wage — with some success at the state level, where a handful of states and Washington, D.C., have eliminated it.
• Trump's proposal could "take the steam out of" those efforts, warns Gleckman.

The bottom line: To help restaurant workers, raising or abolishing the subminimum wage might be more effective than cutting taxes most of them don't pay.

One in four Fortune 500 companies experienced a service disruption due to Friday's global IT outages. They likely lost a combined $5.4 billion, the vast majority of it uninsured, according to a new report from cyber insurer Parametrix.

Why it matters: Nation-state hackers have a history of hijacking companies to send out malicious software updates that can wreak havoc on computer systems for days on end. But no cyberattack in history reached the scale of last week's CrowdStrike incident.

• The report this week provides some of the first estimates on the financial fallout.

The big picture: On average, affected companies lost an estimated $43.6 million each, according to the Parametrix report.

• All Fortune 500 airlines and roughly 75% of the top health care organizations and banks were impacted.
• Parametrix estimates that total insured losses across the Fortune 500 fall between $540 million and $1.08 billion.

Zoom in: The health care sector took the biggest collective hit, losing roughly $1.9 billion.

• Airlines lost about $860 million, according to Parametrix's analysis.

Between the lines: CrowdStrike accounts for only 15% of the market for security software, according to Gartner, but that share is highly concentrated in the Fortune 500.

Yes, but: The software and IT-related services sector was one of the least affected industries, according to Parametrix, with only 21% facing disruptions.

• That's because most software companies run on Linux, which was unaffected by CrowdStrike's faulty software update.

Go deeper: CrowdStrike outage is a wake-up call