2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: What should the federal minimum wage be? [View all]BlueCheese
(2,522 posts)Obviously $7.25 (where it is now) is too low to really live on; further, a lot of research has shown that in that range, raising the minimum wage doesn't have negative economic consequences. Obviously $100 is too high. I think everyone would agree on that too. In the middle is a range of workable numbers, with your preference dependent on how you weigh various factors.
I'm only pointing out that if you were doing a study to set the minimum wage from scratch, and you looked everywhere on Earth to see what every other country was doing, and you decided to essentially make the US minimum wage the highest of all of those, you'd end up with $12 (in terms of purchasing power). That far from being some sort of corporate-friendly miserly level, it's as far as evidence has suggested we can go without undue risk.