The Living Wage is merely the Left's attempt to buy votes.

All this will do is drive inflation . Someone who was making $10 an hour is now making $15 an hour but that is what their boss was making so you have to give them a raise also and so on down the line . Now there is more money in circulation which will more demand on goods and services which in turn will drive prices higher. Guess what in a few years the $15 an hour people are in the same boat they were before . I would like to see them determine what the minimum wage , once and for all , should be and then tie it to inflation {or deflation } . Revisit every 5 or 10 years , determine the inflation rate and adjust accordingly . You want to make more get a skill that pays more .

Before you can understand why the progressive Left is so fixated on $15/hr, you have to understand the purpose it serves for them.

What if I told you that one proposal floated by Bernie Sanders introduced a flat tax to be paid by all Americans for universal health care? That is, if you didn't meet the income threshhold, your health care would be fully subsidized by the government?

What if I then told you that the income threshold proposed was $28,500 annually, which is a very interesting number for the $15/hr argument, because if you worked a what is considered "US hourly office worker full-time" - meaning you would not be paid for ten Federal holidays and were expected to take two weeks each year of combined sick and vacation leave - at $15/hr you would still earn $28,900, meaning that you would be eligible for the health care flat tax.(1)

Put differently, that threshold was crafted such that - if you're a full-time hourly worker - even under the scenario where you'd work the least amount of hours relative to all full-time hourly employees, you'd still end up paying the flat tax...IF....you were making $15/hr.

Or in other words, they needed to raise the minimum full-time annual income for hourly employees to AT LEAST a threshold by which they could then apply a new tax, and take that money back in order to pay for universal health care, understanding that there would be a lot of people getting fully subsidized care. Where even people making the Federal minimum, would still end up being taxed to pay for benefits to people who do not work.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, Sanders' proposal did not get moved forward in Congress. As such, few know exactly how much that flat tax would've been. But I have heard at least one pundit claiming knowledge of the proposed legislation that the flat tax would've been large enough to make $15/hr the same after taxes as $7.50/hr is today. If there is any truth to that - and I cannot claim that there is - this means the whole effort to raise the minimum hourly wage is not to help people working at minimum wage to escape poverty, but as a vehicle for creating enough tax revenue to institute government-based universal health care.

Some would say that's a worthy endeavor. But if that's the goal, why the subterfuge? You don't think the people celebrating having their minimum wage doubled are going to be royally pissed off when they see those gains swallowed up by additional taxes, leaving them basically where they started?

(1) Obviously, if you worked holidays and never took leave, you'd make more and still be above the tax threshold. This is essentially the lowest common scenario of what constitutes "full-time hours" in the US.

The Price of Raising the Minimum Wage for You - The Economy

We have been seeing corporations answers to the minimum wage increase. Wal-Mart and their self checkout, Dollar General now has self checkout, kiosks at fast food restaurants, virtual bank tellers at the banks. Politicians can't force pay raises they can only destroy entry level and high school jobs.

The answer to poverty is an old one. Live within your means. If you earn twenty thousand a year, you can't live like you earn fifty thousand a year. People working are tired of half of their earnings going for taxes to support those who want more than they deserve.