It isn't a guarantee of that when you tie it to an hourly rate. Anyone who isn't delivering enough value after the rate hike is going to have their hours cut an

It isn't a guarantee of that when you tie it to an hourly rate. Anyone who isn't delivering enough value after the rate hike is going to have their hours cut and is going to have a harder time finding a second job, which is something a lot of minimum wage workers have to do thanks to overtime pay requirements. I'm not saying this as some upper middle class libertarian either, I was still working these jobs just a couple years ago. A 40 hour or less work week for me would have kept me in that position nearly indefinitely. Yet raising the minimum wage much higher than it is now would price the people who are most in need of employment out of the labor market. I know you're probably likely to cite recent wage hikes in certain cities as evidence that this isn't the case, but those are areas where a dollar has a much lower purchasing power than it does in most of the country. A national minimum wage of $12 an hour would have made a huge number of the people I'd worked with at a minimum wage job a liability rather than an asset.