Why not? We could double or triple the minimum wage, or make it $1000 an hour, and nothing will change. Low skill workers will still struggle to make ends meet.
Here's why...
Let's take a supermarket as a case study and pretend you are the owner of a supermarket. Now your average supermarket might have about two hundred employees from baggers, cashiers, shelf stockers, deli workers, produce workers, etc. About half of them are at or around the minimum wage.
You are now mandated by law to double the minimum wage.
Now mind you, it would not be enough to simply ensure that everybody in the store is taken to the new minimum wage. You would have to also raise the wages of everybody else in the store because you would have a revolt on your hands if you suddenly elevated entry level workers to the same pay level as experienced people who had been working there for years.
So if the minimum wage doubled from $7.25 to $14.50 an hour, you would have to raise pretty much everybody in the store by $7.25 an hour. So that means that journeyman meat cutter in the meat department you were paying $16 an hour would need to get raised to around $23.50 an hour, otherwise you would be paying him almost the same as some 17-year-old kid up front bagging groceries.
Repeat this process for every employee in the store, including management. Everybody's salary would need to be right-sized to accomodate the new mandated minimum wage.
So what do you think that would do to the prices in the store?
You got it. They would effectively double. That gallon of milk that used to cost you $4 will now cost you $8. And so on.
Don't forget that the doubling of the minimum wage will have a cascading effect on all the vendors that supply the supermarket. Their labor costs will double as well and they will pass those costs on to you. So if you were paying your produce supplier $15,000 a week to keep your produce bins full of lettuce, tomatoes, and apples, etc., you can count on paying much more than that because that produce vendor had their labor costs double as well.
The net result is that the initial euphoria that your low level employees will feel over having their wages raised across the board will quickly dampen when they find out that their cost of living has increased by almost the exact same amount as their wages. They will quickly be clamoring that they cannot make ends meet on their paltry $14.50 an hour and that something must be done.
And then the vicious cycle starts all over again.
And being in higher tax brackets will make people worse off.
Great explanation. Too bad low and no information voters don’t get this. There shouldn’t even be a minimum wage set by the government. It needs to be determined by market forces.