We do and that's tipped wages. A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k, which is several times more than what they would make in Europe. Even if you adjust for cost of living and median incomes, it's still going to be much higher. On the low end of the spectrum, tipped wages and untipped wages would be both at minimum wage.
Yeah, but this is counter service we are talking about. The person making your latte is not making $100k/year. When I worked at a coffee place ~20 years ago, tips were about $1/hour per employee and that was like 10% of my income. Certainly wages and presumably tips are higher now, but these jobs still dont pay much over minimum wage.
afaik tips are taxed as income tax. Yes I'm sure practically it gets underreported but servers definitely would raise suspicions if they reported $0.
This conflation of actual legally tipped employees (who get a substantially smaller than minimum wage wage) and everyone else is leading to really stupid ideas.