Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, has said something stupid again. I know, dog bites man, but the details are fun! He came out in favor of a lower minimum wage for waiters and waitresses, and claimed along the way that some of them earn more than $100,000 per year. That raised a few brows among those capable of doing arithmetic. The minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) is, for a full-time worker, less than $16,000 per year. So to make $100,000 a waiter or waitress would have to make about $85,000 in tips. That's more than $40 every hour, shift after shift, all year long.
Among those with raised brows are workers at the Eagle Street Grille, in St. Paul, whose owner, Emmer says, told him that some of the servers there earn into six figures. The servers say they don't and are not pleased to hear their boss, arguing for a lower minimum wage, overstate their incomes by a factor of at least two. So now the owner, an Emmer supporter, is doing a little tap dance between his employees and his candidate. Emmer said nothing wrong, but no one at his place earns $100,000, he was misquoted, or "manipulated," or something. Completely incoherent. If no one at the Eagle Street Grille makes $100,000, then Emmer did say something wrong.
One thing I love about Emmer is that his looniness, though consistent, conforms to the tenets of no coherent philosophy, unless screwing over wage-earners counts. He loves all guns, but his lunacy honors the shotgun, not the rifle. In the Minnesota legislature, he co-sponsored a bill that would have prevented federal laws from taking effect in Minnesota unless approved by two-thirds of the members of both the State House and the State Senate--and even then the governor, which is what he wants to be, would have to sign on, too. Why not just secede from the union? Meanwhile, regarding tipped workers, he apparently wants to reduce the minimum wage to the $2.13 per hour that federal law permits.
We should adopt the federal standard for tipped workers. We should nullify federal law. An admirer might say Tom Emmer is "nimble."
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