> Minimum wage jobs are supposed to be targeted at young unskilled/uneducated individuals... Young, unskilled & uneducated individuals are disproportionately r

> Minimum wage jobs are supposed to be targeted at young unskilled/uneducated individuals... Young, unskilled & uneducated individuals are disproportionately represented in minimum wage jobs because (by definition) they lack qualifications for other jobs. That doesn't mean that these jobs are targeted at that group. > The problem is we now have a massive portion of the population attempting to live off minimum wage jobs... There are only approximately 3.3 million hourly workers earning minimum wage in the US -- which works out to about 2% of the workforce. How much smaller should it be as a percentage of the workforce? > ...instead of graduating into higher paid - higher skilled jobs. Working sufficiently hard at a minimum wage job is not a path towards advancement. A minimum wage job is not enough to pay for college [2], and combined with aggressive part-timing isn't enough to live on [3]. How ought these low-skilled workers with two jobs and inadequate income to afford college go about "graduating into higher paid...jobs"? > Raising minimum wage every few years when it perpetually becomes "not enough to feed a family on" is a near-sighted solution. I agree. We should index it to inflation with automatic corrections applied every decade or so. Then we won't have to keep arguing about it. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-minimum-wage/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-mi... [2] http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2011/11/a_minimum_wage_job_no_longer_c.html http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2011/11/a_min... [3] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/mcdonalds-cant-figure-out-how-its-workers-survive-on-minimum-wage/277845/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/mcdonald...