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| Looney -- WNPR.org |
A Looney Idea
In 2016 President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s Senate Martin Looney received a replacement
kidney from a donor. The new organ allowed him to regain a sense of vigor that served
him well when he proposed Senate Bill 96 ( S.B. 96), a punishing piece of
legislation that would, according to Cycle News, “automatically assume
any motorcyclist killed on the road is an organ donor if they were riding
without a helmet, a choice currently available to riders over 18 years old in
Connecticut.”
It may be a bill too far, even for the postmodern
progressives in the state who support Looney. Certainly postmodern progressive
motorcyclists would wince at the indignity of having their organs harvested by
progressive jackals in a moral desert.
Hunter Biden’s Lawyers
Shakespearian scholars and legal ethicists are arguing, even
today, that Dick the Butcher’s quip in History of Henry VI, Part II –
“First thing we do [when we take power] let’s kill all the lawyers” -- is
really no slur on lawyers. Dick means something entirely different, the lawyers
argue. Neither the lawyers nor the scholars have yet addressed the question: If
the modern legal profession was operating in Shakespeare’s day, would he have
been permitted to bring forward any of his plays? Would not all of them be
flogged to death by libel lawyers seeking big payouts?
Hunter Biden, likely underwritten by his famous or infamous
father, President Joe Biden, has lawyered up, and the lawyers are now
contesting not the provenance of the laptop’s data – the data on the laptop has
not been engineered by Russians
hoping to boost the fortunes of former President Donald Trump, the authorial
New York Times tells us -- but rather the admissibility of the evidence in
courts, with a view to snuffing evidence that may be used in prosecuting Hunter
Biden and possibly his long-suffering father, “lunch pail” Joe. Given the
seemingly endless complexity of the appeals process, the lawyers, now threatening
to sue Fox News and other news outlets, may be successful in intimidating a
media well-disposed to the president from commenting on the laptop until the
appeals process has been exhausted – one may hope sometime before the turn of
the next century.
To Tip or Not to Tip
Restaurants in Connecticut that have managed to survive the
ministrations of the state’s progressive government during the COVID period
that, prominent Democrats now assure us, may now be seen in our rearview
mirrors are once again being hammered by equitist Democrats in the state’s
General Assembly.
Progressive leader of the state’s Senate Martin Looney is leading the way to
equity’s yellow brick road with a “One Fair Wage” bill now making its way through
the legislative sausage-maker.
There is a gap, Looney explains in a Hartford Courant story, between
tipped and non-tipped workers.
“When we started to raise the minimum wage, we did not
affect the tip wage,” Looney said. “The gap between [the tip wage and minimum
wage] was between $6.38 and $10.10 and now it’s between $6.38 and $14, going to
$15. So that’s why we need to, I think, look at that again this year.”
President and CEO of the Connecticut Restaurant Association
Scott Dolch begs to differ: “Tipped employees in Connecticut make nearly double
the minimum wage on average and, like all workers, are guaranteed by law to
never make less than the minimum wage.”
Looney and others have argued that a rise in the minimum
wage of tipped restaurant servers, all things else being equal, would make more
workers available. The unacknowledged reality is – all things else are never
equal.
Restaurant consultant Robert Marcarelli observes: “A lot of
people left the industry in general when the pandemic happened, and they just
never came back and they never thought of coming back. I don’t think that the
wage is going to bring those sorts of people back.” Then too, servers and
bartenders already earn “far beyond” the minimum wage. “In most of the
restaurants that I’ve seen, the servers and the bartenders are making more than
the management. You have servers that are certainly making well above $25 to
$30, even $40 an hour and that’s in a four or five-hour period.”
The problem Looney’s solution is meant to solve disappears
under close scrutiny. However, the nearly certain possibility that his
political solution will create adverse unintended consequences is beyond the
ken of most postmodern progressives who have not in recent days visited
restaurants that have not disappeared in Connecticut. Politically induced
raises among tipped servers, most of whom earn considerably more than minimum
wages, will cause a drop off in sales,
since wage costs are passed on to customers in the form of higher menu prices.
And the many closures of restaurants are a signal that the restaurants are
already operating within dangerously low profit margins.
When this writer showed the Courant story to a waitress who had moved from a closed diner he used to frequent just outside of Hartford to a new berth in East Hartford, she frowned and shook her head sadly.
She works three days a week in the diner. An insider and a refugee from a closed diner,
she appreciates her tips, is unfailingly cheerful, and grateful to her employer
– and her customers who reward her service with tips that lift her above the
growing number of unfortunates who have lost their jobs, thanks to solicitous,
vote grabbing postmodern progressive politicians such as Looney.
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