Tom Emmer meets with restaurant servers

There were some errors of reporting of what Emmer had said regarding how much food servers should be paid, but he did say repeatedly that the tax credit should be put back to the owners so they can pay under minimum wage.  He also said there are servers who make $100,000 and that is more than the owners of the restaurant.   If there are any servers making that kind of money,  surely the restaurant owner has little to worry about  since that would translate into roughly 1/2 million in sales for one server.  That’s assuming people are tipping 20% which often they don’t.   There has to be a lot of profit in that.  Emmer now says he was told that by someone else, so it’s apparently not his fault that he making things up as he goes along stating them as fact.

Now he is doing the Michele Bachmann spin saying he never said what he said.  He did say repeatedly that he wants to bring back the tip credit for the restaurant owners which would reduce the amount they have to pay per hour for the servers.  Now he is saying he wants the first 20,000 in tips to be tax free.  But he did not address the fact that he still supports the tip credit where by the servers could be paid less than minimum wage because of their income from tips.

Here’s a link to 10 minutes of what he had to say at the Eagle Street Grill.

I must say that I was surprised that the audience was not screened and controlled with just Emmerites.  It was packed with some very angry people.   It does seem unlikely that this won him any votes, but this one is sly like a fox, not to be underestimated.