Kenneth Harney: Is the tax overhaul regulation impacting real estate?

It’s an annual ceremony of passage: scooping ice cream, ready tables or supervising children at an afternoon camp for the summer season. But that enjoy may be more difficult to find and much less lucrative this year, as numerous neighborhood employers said that the rise in minimum salary from $11 to $12 an hour has meant they may be hiring fewer people, reducing lower back on time beyond regulation and/or raising fees.
“We’re hiring much less human beings, we need to,” stated Debbie Powell, co-proprietor of Crystal Caves in Auburn. Ms. Powell said she would generally lease 20 teenagers and college college students to screen Crystal Caves’ mini-golfing route, batting cages, and ice cream stand. This yr she anticipates hiring 16 or 17. Meanwhile, she said she gets three hundred to four hundred job applications.
“I sense for those children, I honestly do, I feel for them,” said Ms. Powell, whose circle of relatives has owned Crystal Caves for 23 years. “But if I can’t have enough money to pay them, I surely can’t come up with the money to rent them.”
Dan Brunner, who owns a Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches franchise in downtown Worcester, additionally has decreased his body of workers.
“We’ve needed to tighten up now not only the number of human beings we’ve added on but the number of hours we have people on,” Mr. Brunner stated. Mr. Brunner anticipated that he could have workers inner the store and 4 drivers throughout height lunchtime this summer season, down from three to 4 personnel inside the store and five drivers. “We’re plenty extra proactive to cut if there’s nothing taking place,” Mr. Brunner stated. “In this surroundings, you have to pinch as many pennies as you can to make the dollar.”
The state minimum wage elevated from $eleven an hour to $12 an hour on Jan. 1, the first in annual increases to bring the national minimum wage to $15 an hour via January 2023. Tipped people also noticed a growth in their minimum wage this 12 months, from $3.75 an hour to $four.35 an hour, and tipped people’ minimum wages will growth every yr for the next 5 years until it reaches $6.Seventy-five an hour in January 2023.