I know that this thread is actually pretty old, but the discussion has continued every few months, so I feel justified in posting.
I'd just like to say that arguments like that really grind me the wrong way. Sometimes we don't have a choice, sometimes we just have to accept what we can find in order to get by. As @
Gunner said above, not everyone wants to go to university/college and become rich, and no matter what happens, someone has to do the regular jobs that no one else wants to do. It used to be the idea that unskilled, low wage jobs were meant for high school students and the like, but
that is simply no longer applicable. The economy in the US is so bad that supposedly "unskilled" jobs are being filled by overqualified people who
can't find a job anywhere else because there are none. Low-skilled jobs still require people to work full-time to, and those full-time workers aren't high school students, they're people old enough to be out of school who actually have bills to pay and mouths to feed. The minimum wage in the US is pathetic, and no one so far in this thread has actually made any decent argument for why it's acceptable.
As for a rise in minimum wage causing a rise in the cost of living that negates the minimum wage rise, that's just crap spouted by corporations and their political supporters with no basis in reality or historical precedent. Whenever the minimum wage in Australia has been raised, the cost of living has only increased by roughly 10-15% comparative to the wage increase. An item that may have cost $5 prior to the wage increase will cost $5.10 after it. Meanwhile, the minimum wage worker has more money to spend and uses that money to improve their standard of living, which then stimulates the economy and benefits the entire nation.
I'm not sure how many Aussies we have on this forum, but most of you will probably know anyway that Australia came out of the GFC almost unscathed. This was because the government at the time used the budget surplus to stimulate the economy and keep it going by giving a sum of money to every person that met certain criteria (the vast majority of the population). People didn't just save the money because they were worried about the GFC, they went out and spent it (as they were encouraged to do) which kept the economy alive. The point I'm making is that when people have money to spend on their quality of life, they spend it, and it has only positive affects on the economy.
Everybody wins.