On the surface the question would seem like a no-brainer. "Of course the minimum wage should be raised!". And I would submit that anyone who does not feel scorn for these workers would feel the impulse to raise it as well. It's not hard to justify; there are plenty of folks to be found who are working darned hard yet have little hope of rising above poverty.
Yet I wonder if at least part of our trouble is that we're trying to live beyond our means. I think of my Grandparents. These are folks who raised children during the Great Depression. It doesn't take much imagination to think that they would be, literally, astounded by my buying power. (A brief bit of disclosure before I go on; I'm a bit above minimum wage. But not all that far. And if my current job were to disappear I'd be unlikely to find something similar. I'd fall back to the bottom. And the people we're talking about here are the people I rub elbows with. I'm not very far removed from them.) I don't pity my 'poverty'. But if my Grandparents perceived me to be doing so they'd, no doubt, scorn my 'spoiled' attitude. If they could have lived their life-style on my income they'd have thought they'd died and gone to heaven. Or to put it in more realistic terms; they would have achieved The American Dream a few decades earlier than they, in fact, did and they would have done so with far fewer worried and sleep deprived nights.
So, can we adjust our lives to match? No doubt it would be difficult. But is it impossible? Imagine a household with, say, two adults working nearly 40 hrs/wk plus one adult working less plus a couple of kids in school. Should such a household really have three, sometimes four, automobiles? I think they could do better than that, especially if we'd just improve our public transportation. But even if we didn't do that, couldn't at least one of those working adults get to work by some form of their own muscle power? I've been watching. Examples are as common as hen's teeth. And does each and every member of this household really need a smartphone? Does this household really need to pay Comcast for their product, such as it is?
Now it could be that if we were able to transform this society to one that lives as frugally as America did in the 1930s, then one inevitable result would be that the economy as a whole, or our GDP, must shrink to the size it was back then. Adjusted, perhaps, for 'population inflation'. After all, what I'm suggesting would seem to result in lower demand in general. Done wrong or too quickly this could surely be a bad thing. But done slowly and gently wouldn't it seem that this might be a very good idea? There must come a day when present rates of resource consumption must come to an end. Wouldn't it be a good idea to start easing demand while we have the choice?
It wouldn't be hard to go on. But you get the idea. So, before closing, I'll approach the question from a somewhat different angle.
You'll sometimes hear opponents of a minimum wage increase use this, rather sarcastic, argument; "Sure, let's raise it to $10,000/hr! Then everything will cost 1000 times as much!" One obvious counter-argument would be, "Then let's lower it to $0/hr. Then everything will be free!"
But both sides of that argument are worthless. They're both trying to use extremes on a very mixed and general situation. Yet something realistic must lie somewhere in-between. An 'optimum minimum wage'.
I'm at a loss as to how to calculate this optimum minimum wage. And I suppose the answer would depend on some variables. One that comes to mind would be; how much demand is good for our economy? How much is too much? How much is too little?
I'll have to do some thinking before I can explore this question. But in the meantime I'd welcome the thoughts of others.