How one tweet changed my thinking on D.C.’s min. wage

I oppose minimum wage hikes for various moral and economic reasons, but I usually don’t have a personal stake in the debate. Fortunately, my wage is high enough that a minimum wage hike wouldn’t give me a raise or put me out of a job.

I approached Washington’s minimum wage debate with personal disinterest until I saw the following tweet from Capitol Lounge, a bar on Capitol Hill: “The reality for us: if this bill passes, we will be forced to make drastic changes or close entirely.”

The bar chose an interesting time to break its slogan: “No Politics. No Miller Lite.”

If you haven’t been to Capitol Lounge, you should try it out if you’re in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. They have great buffalo chicken tenders. When the weather is nice, there’s outdoor seating. There always seems to be Michigan craft beers on tap (which is good for me, since I’m from Michigan). The vintage political posters on the wall are an interesting blast from the past.

Most importantly for my personal interests, it is the best place in the Washington area to watch Michigan State sports.

Since I moved to the area, I’ve spent many games at Capitol Lounge dressed in green and white, eating from their Spartan-themed special menu, drinking Bell’s and even leading the occasional “Go green! Go white!” chant. I have too many fond memories at Capitol Lounge to be okay with it closing. The unbelievable finish at the end of the 2015 Michigan football game. The overtime victory against Louisville to seal our improbable run to the 2015 basketball Final Four as a seven-seed.

Those would have been great moments even if I had watched them from my couch. But the joy of celebrating with a large crowd makes victory so much better. Those memories will be tough to beat, but I expect to make more in the seasons to come.

So when I was casually scrolling through tweets last week and saw someone retweet Capitol Lounge, I felt a jolt, realizing Bowser’s proposed minimum wage hikes would have negative consequences, even for me and thousands of other bar-goers throughout the city.

Yes, I realize this all sounds exceedingly trivial if you live in poverty. But anyone living in poverty would rather have a low-wage job than no job at all.

Those calling for minimum wage hikes acknowledge that minimum wage hikes do cause some unemployment. That’s why nobody says the minimum wage should be $100 an hour or more.

There’s no doubt that a higher minimum wage will raise expenses for restaurants. It’s not like area bars are vast corporations that are able to easily withstand a steep rise in labor costs. “Not all restaurants will be able to afford the $7.50 base pay plus tips, and many will likely adopt an entirely new compensation method, paying a fixed hourly wage to all employees and applying a service charge to the final bill — and discouraging tipping,” Kathy Hollinger, president of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, told The Washington Times.

If bars try to comply with a minimum wage hike through higher food and drink prices, many customers will go elsewhere or stay home. I like watching sports at a bar, but my tab is already high enough that if it went much higher I’d stay home. The minimum wage hike isn’t likely to raise the price of my groceries very much, or my cable subscription at all.

There are alternative ways of helping low-income workers and families without closing restaurants and putting people out of work with a minimum wage hike. Bowser should consider expanding the city’s Earned Income Tax Credit. The city could cut back on zoning restrictions that make it difficult to build affordable housing. A business tax cut would allow job creators to expand downtown.

All those options would be preferable to a minimum wage hike that threatens to shutter a bar where Michigan State fans gather, primarily to support the Spartans, but also a local small business and its workers.

Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.