He does not realize that labor costs are a Major part of product costs. Once you raise minimum wage, retailers will have to raise their prices, the government will recalculate the poverty level because everything is more expensive and we will be right back where we started.
The "poverty level" is just a concept which is set by government for one reason: To provide the government with an excuse to raise "apparent standard of living" and garner the votes of the idiot segment of the population. In fact, whenever the "poverty level" is set it has nothing to do with inflation adjusted income -- it is an arbitrary percentage of the population (somewhere around 20%). In other words the government will always determine that the lowest quintile (in terms of reported income) of the population is "poor". In order to "eliminate poverty" (ostensibly the rationale of the War on Poverty) everyone would have income equal to everyone else. Everywhere that concept has been attempted to be implemented has resulted in everyone (with the exception of government leadership) living in abject misery. Communism is Communism.