Daily Archives: 9 September 2025

Tipped Wages or Not?

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McDonald’s is insisting that every restaurant—especially fast food restaurants—should be required to do away with tip-based wages and pay servers at least the Federal-level minimum wage. There are a couple of major disingenuosities in the surrounding argument.

McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski:

Right now, there’s an uneven playing field,

because casual-dining restaurants, bars, and other establishments to pay below the typical minimum wage to tip-earning workers. If he thinks so, he should push for getting his restaurant able to similarly pay his workers rather than demanding that others kowtow to his business model.

Kempczinski went on:

If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor[.]

This is an especially blatant bit of disingenuousness. The customer already is paying for the restaurant’s labor. The customer also is paying for the restaurant’s cooking, food and food preparation inputs, rent, management salaries, every cost the restaurant incurs. Those costs are included in the prices the restaurant puts on its menu. Tipping is just a customer-facing line item on the bill.

This is nothing but a regulated business manager venally and self-servingly trying to capture the regulators and impose added costs on his smaller and weaker competitors.

What, Me Worry?

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President Donald Trump (R) authorized the US Navy to destroy a drug smuggling boat in international Caribbean Sea waters. The Left and their Party politicians are in an uproar. Trump has said that the drug smuggler was a threat to national security.

But that claim was sharply disputed by legal experts and some lawmakers, who said that Trump exceeded his legal authority by using lethal military force against a target that posed no direct danger to the US and doing so without congressional authorization.

Last bit first: Trump—any President—has constitutional authority to address threats to our nation’s security, including using lethal force. That’s at the core of the President’s job.

Then there’s this from Frank Kendall, ex-Biden SecAF:

The casualties “weren’t engaged in anything like a direct attack on the United States….” “Frankly, I can’t see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law.”

The bit about the drug smuggling boat being no danger to the US is, at best, disingenuous in the present environment. That environment consists of drugs being smuggled into our nation on the scale it is, the movement of particularly lethal drugs like fentanyl and their precursors (the latter sourced from an enemy nation) into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico and Venezuela (among other receiving nations), and the resulting scale of American deaths directly from those drugs and indirectly from the smuggling operations. To insist that a single smuggling boat is no threat to our national security is akin to insisting that a single enemy combat ship in the course of a different type of ongoing conflict is no particular national threat and so, don’t worry about it, we shouldn’t sink it.