With little more than two weeks to go until the midterm elections, it seems increasingly possible that the Democrats, already a big favorite to win control of the House of Representatives, will also take charge of the planet's most elite nursing home, the United States Senate, where the median age is 64 years old. RealClearPolitics' poll aggregator has moved control of "the world's greatest deliberative body" (as its members are grandiosely wont to call it) to "toss up," status and prediction markets are now breaking big toward a blue wave. As of this writing, Kalshi has its Senate odds at 63 percent for the Dems vs. 37 percent for the GOP; Polymarket is at 62 percent vs. 39 percent.

As gratifying as it might be to see unprincipled Trump enablers reduced to minority status after signing off on economy-wrecking tariffs, inhumane immigration detentions, and wars of choice, there's at least one good reason to dread a Democratic majority too: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts progressive who is spending the run-up to the midterms freaking out over possible consolidation in the condiments business and accusing private equity firms of gutting such shopping-mall favorites as Claire's and Toys R Us. There's every reason to believe that a Senate run by Warren and other economic interventionists will waste time, money, and resources trying to prevent a world in which, per the X wag Iowahawkblog, "a panopticon conglomerate owns two brands of hot sauce."

On October 13, Warren posted this dire warning to X:

Hellmann's mayo
McCormick spices
Cholula hot sauce
Frank's RedHot

What do these products have in common? One company could soon control them all.

I have concerns that McCormick and Unilever's $45 billion merger could increase YOUR grocery prices.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 13, 2026

It's hard to think of a more competitive and varied market than the one for hot sauces, which is expected to more than double over the next decade. The barriers to entry are generally low, as are the key ingredients, and new entrants can easily market and sell online, avoiding the costs of buying shelf space in conventional supermarkets. Yet Warren is urging regulators at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to halt mergers of both product makers like McCormick and Unilever and grocery stores like Kroger and Giant Eagle.

The latter complaint is particularly picayune. Kroger is one of the country's largest supermarket chains, operating around 2,800 stores under its own name as well as Harris Teeter, Ralph's, and others. Giant Eagle operates about 170 stores. This merger is no more the stuff of nightmares than a single company producing both Cholula and Frank's RedHot. If Warren gains more clout from being in the majority, expect her to butt in more and more on such mergers.

Making it harder for businesses to adapt is not a recipe for making goods and services more affordable. But Warren is keen to blame economic creative destruction not on "new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates" (as Joseph Schumpeter would have it), but on pure greed. In a TikTok released earlier this month, she shows a poster board with corporate logos from once-thriving companies that she says have been "gutted" by "private equity" firms.

"Here's your local mall," she piously intones. "Now, private equity wants you to believe that Red Lobster went bankrupt because of their endless shrimp….They want you to believe that Claire's went bankrupt because teens stopped shopping at the mall." In Warren's telling, private equity firms magically take over thriving businesses and then strip them bare. The typical pattern is that private equity enters the picture after a business is failing.

Virtually all accounts of the decline of, for example, Red Lobster, note that the chain had been spiraling for several reasons before the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital got involved in 2014. As this CNN article notes, the chain, which started in 1968, had seen drops in sales as customer desires changed. Management compounded the difficulties with a series of bad decisions, including continuing various all-you-can-eat menu specials, before coming out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

Similarly, it's true that some teens still go to malls and get their ears pierced at Claire's. But anyone who has spent time in retail America over the past few decades knows that malls are no longer the destination that they once were. As CapitalOne Shopping Research documents, "in 1986, there were 25,000 malls, large and small, nationwide." By 2023, that number had shrunk to just 1,200. While some malls are coming back, most are not, and for reasons that have nothing to do with private equity. Online retails plays a role (though a smaller one than usually imagined, with e-commerce accounting for less than 20 percent of all retail sales). But mostly, it's that people today tend to want a different sort of retail environment. Anchor stores—think Macy's and J.C. Penney—are shadows of themselves, and younger people have less unstructured time in which to prowl food courts and arcades.

For politicians like Elizabeth Warren, though, there can be no financial gains or losses that aren't the result of shadowy, conspiratorial forces. If her party takes control of the Senate, her words will carry more weight. But it will be American consumers that ultimately shoulder the burden of an even-more-regulated economy. The market for hot sauces will almost certainly stay spicy, but many other parts will surely suffer.

The post Be Prepared for Elizabeth Warren's Reign of Economic Error appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In recent years, one of the predominant policy initiatives of the progressive left has been raising the minimum wage in locales around the country. At the same time, left-leaning politicians have sought the elimination of what's known as the tip credit, which allows employers to pay restaurant servers and other tipped employees a lower hourly base wage that they then bolster with gratuities.

Just a few years into this experiment, however, policymakers are showing signs of an about-face on the tip credit's abolition as they grapple with the unfortunate, and predictable, economic results.

In 2022, Washington, D.C., made news headlines when voters passed Initiative 82. As originally designed, it would have repealed the tip credit and required servers to be paid the District's full statutory minimum wage by 2027. (D.C.'s minimum wage was $16.10 per hour in 2022, but has since risen to $18.40 due to inflation indexation.) Prior to Initiative 82, D.C. servers could be paid a $5.35 tipped wage, so long as they earned enough tips to make up the difference between the lower tipped wage and the higher traditional minimum wage.

D.C.'s Initiative 82 was just the beginning. One Fair Wage, a progressive group that lobbies against subminimum wages, quarterbacked an all-out push to eliminate the tip credit in jurisdictions across America. Chicago became the second prominent city to follow suit. States like New York, Connecticut, and Illinois also quickly saw legislation introduced to eliminate the tip credit at a statewide level. (Apart from this recent wave, a small handful of American states—including California, Oregon, and Alaska—have long operated without a tip credit).

But just when it seemed like momentum against the tip credit had reached its apex, progressive politicians started to see the writing on the wall. In the aftermath of the tip credit's repeal, D.C. saw a close to 5 percent decline in full-service restaurant jobs. Tipped worker earnings also dropped by just under $12 million—likely a result, at least in part, of restaurants reducing hours for staff in the face of higher labor costs. At the same time, many D.C. restaurants began implementing service fees or so-called auto-gratuity policies that added mandatory 10-20 percent charges onto customers' bills.

Mugged by this economic reality, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called for the full repeal of Initiative 82. Ultimately, the D.C. Council settled for a partial repeal in 2025, maintaining at least some semblance of a tipped wage that sits below the traditional minimum wage into the years ahead (although the tipped wage eventually rises to 75 percent of the traditional wage by 2034). This was a familiar story: The council had previously repealed Initiative 77, a near-identical attempt to abolish the tipped wage that voters passed in 2018.

After Chicago moved to eliminate the tip credit, the Illinois Restaurant Association found that 89 percent of Windy City restaurants raised menu prices; another 79 percent responded by reducing worker hours. Again bowing to economic reality, the progressive Chicago City Council voted to freeze the tip credit's planned elimination, only to see the effort vetoed by Mayor Brandon Johnson. Eventually, a compromise was brokered to at least pause the tip credit at its current level for two years—which punts the issue until after Johnson stands for election again, allowing a potential successor to endorse a more lasting reversal.

In Michigan, a 2024 state supreme court ruling set the tip credit on the path toward elimination by 2030. But state lawmakers intervened last year, deciding to maintain a 50 percent tip credit in perpetuity after 2031. Notably, Michigan is currently governed by a Democratic trifecta in the governorship and both houses of the Legislature. The tip credit's revival garnered key support from Republican lawmakers to pass in a bipartisan fashion, before being signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

While progressive efforts to eliminate the tip credit may be motivated by an earnest desire to ensure waiters are paid more, the math isn't that simple. Requiring a server to be paid a $16 traditional minimum wage—up from a $5 tipped wage—might appear to raise their pay on paper. But this fails to consider several important factors.

Under our "No Taxes on Tips" new normal, raising the minimum wage for servers could lead to a partial reduction in tips, which under certain scenarios can result in less take-home pay for waiters once the taxman takes his cut. If more server earnings come in the form of "auto-gratuity" policies—which are treated as taxed wages under the law—then the tax repercussions may grow even grimmer.

But more broadly, these laws attempt to subvert basic economics. As of 2025, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that D.C. restaurants shed over 1,600 jobs in aftermath of Initiative 82; meanwhile, between 2022 and 2025, restaurant job growth in the District declined by more than 8 percent. This is just one example. The fallout is the inevitable result of restaurants responding to labor costs that suddenly skyrocket, forcing establishments to cut worker hours and sometimes transition to quick-service models that require less hourly staff. And that's to say nothing of the diners who bear the cost with higher prices and new service fees.

"We're watching a beloved bar back, a beloved busser, a dishwasher have their jobs taken away," D.C. restaurant worker Valerie Graham told Reason in 2024. "Not because our owner-operator is an evil billionaire but because they're an independent business owner who had to make some business decisions and there's a callousness with which our industry is talked about."

To be sure, the tip credit has only survived in modified and reduced form in D.C., Chicago, and Michigan—and in the case of Chicago, the about-face is only temporary. But the partial reversals show the tip credit's elimination is not a foregone conclusion. Economic reality continues to rear its head.

The post Some Progressives Tried To Abolish the Tipped Minimum Wage. Now They're Backtracking. appeared first on Reason Magazine.