My daughter works at a mid-tier restaurant 35 hours a week and makes more than my wife who is a math teacher, department head, and has many years of teaching experience.
Eliminating tips and increasing the base wage is a stupid idea. All the talented servers who love the job will leave and mediocre people will replace them.
As someone whose built houses as a contractor and subcontractor for 20+ years, I’d say these article has it mostly right, but misses two major factors in increased costs.
And that is permitting time/costs and the costs of complying with ever more stringent codes.
If we could build homes to the codes of 1990 and the permitting process was the same as it was in 1990, you’d immediately knock 20-30% off of the cost of construction.
What leftists and bureaucrats (and most people in general) never understand is the time value of money. Every extra day added to the construction of a $500K project is a few hundred dollars of interest costs, risk costs, and lost opportunity costs. Those numbers add up quickly. And nowadays, projects take much longer from idea to completion than they used to.