What trying to make minimum wage so high it can support a family is telling the average American that he or she doesn't have to worry about seeking a good job. Whatever job you get will support you.
And what if an employer only needs a person for twenty or less hours per week? Still have to pay the employee a living wage?
They can forget about post-high school training and just get a job flipping burgers or something similar.
Nothing wrong with that kind of job, but it tells people not to work hard for a good, higher paying job. Just sit back and let Big Government run your life for you.
I think instead it is to compensate for the worthless college degrees being put out in subjects which would ordinarily lead to unemployment.
There was a time when a man making $100/week could raise a family on that single income.
But the currency was inflated, the folks pushing the ERA got enough people to buy into that second income, and the price of cars, houses, etc. jumped. Then the environmentalists called for more gadgets to make your car smoke less (raising the price), others wanted it safer rather than learn how to drive (more expense) and that new car went from $3,000 to 15,000 in a few short years. THen there was the CRA, with houses being bought and flipped for profit, and soon a crackerbox most anywhere went from 30K to 250K or more. In short, more often than not, government policy made the present wage insufficient, and if that alone wasn't enough, tax policies helped it along. I won't even talk about what happened to the cost of medical care as a result of government intervention.
I don't recall the Republicans ever running for office on raising taxes, it's always the Democrats who are going to rob the rich to pay the poor, and the net effect all along has been to squeeze the middle class.
Where that really plays into the proletarian dreams of the Communists who took over the Democrat Party in the '60s, is to create the two classes Marxism thrives on, eliminating the benefits of a Capitalist economy for the majority of citizens in the former middle class.
Let's just quit soft pedaling Communism as "socialism", "Democratic Socialism", "Progressivism", "Liberalism", or any of the other monikers it currently goes by and start calling that spade a spade. Communism has never flourished so well as it has since it was declared dead--especially in the USA.