The federal government should subsidize the minimum wage increase to $12 - $15 so it doesn't hurt small businesses or cut jobs.
Solved.
Why not $20 or 30?
Or $75?
We're going to get there someday, so we might as well get there sooner rather than later. And apparently there are never, ever any negative consequences to raising the minimum wage.
Ninety-four years ago, the SCOTUS handled a case called
Adkins v. Children's Hospital. It was a legal challenge to a minimum wage law adopted in Washington D.C. One of the parties who challenged the law was a 21-year-old woman who had a job as an elevator operator at a hotel. It was her testimony in court that she liked her job just fine the way it was, she did not need to earn any more than what the hotel was paying her, that she did not have a set of job skills that would enable her to get any other job, but she would lose her job because of the new minimum wage law -- the hotel decided that paying her the higher amount would not be worth the labor she was performing, so they would simply do without an elevator operator. She argued to the courts that she has a right to keep a job in which she and her employer mutually agreed to the terms of her employment. The SCOTUS agreed with her, saying that the law violates the "freedom of contract" between employees, like this woman, and their employers.
The SCOTUS struck down three more minimum wage laws during the next 13 years, until finally the Court overturned the precedents in 1937,
West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parish.
Of course minimum wage laws eliminate jobs. They always have and they always will.
