As policy analyst James Myall with the Maine Center for Economic Policy points out, if increasing servers’ wages would cause restaurants and bars to close, as Republican lawmakers have suggested, one would expect widespread closures starting in 2017 when the minimum wage went up the most and tipped workers got their record-setting raise.
“I think if we were to see effects, 2017 is the year we would expect to see the biggest effects because that’s where both, in the tipped credit and the regular minimum wage, we saw the biggest nominal and relative rise in the wage,” Myall said. “You would think that’s where the effects would lie.”
