I'm talking about policies that might be thought of as tradeoffs: raising the minimum wage vs lowering taxes (for people on low incomes) or raising benefits. W

I'm talking about policies that might be thought of as tradeoffs: raising the minimum wage vs lowering taxes (for people on low incomes) or raising benefits. What you are talking about is policies that (you claim) would benefit the economy in general and should be done regardless of how we deal with people who are currently on low incomes. And inflation does not harm people's standard of living because real wages will rise or fall depending on the market. Inflation has some short term effects, but if nominal wages remained stagnant (which they haven't), that would be because the value of labor went down, not because of inflation.