If raising the minimum wage will improve the poverty rate, why don't we just eliminate poverty altogether? Make the minimum wage $100 an hour. $200k a year. Problem solved.
Seriously, this is the fallacy taken to a ridiculous extreme. If I own a McDonald's, and have to pay 16 year old burger flippers $10 - $15 an hour ($20k - $30k a year), investing $100k in a machine to do that looks better and better.
The machine works 24/7, doesn't call in sick, doesn't space out and burn burgers near as much as the teenager, doesn't whine about time off to go to a concert, and doesn't play grabass with the workers of the opposite sex.
There's a reason unskilled workers don't get paid much....they don't add as much value as others.
Raising the minimum wage doesn't help poverty. It raises an already-nasty unemployment rate for unskilled workers, and puts yet another obstacle in front of someone wanting to acquire skills by way of work experience, and thereby lift themselves out of the ranks of the unskilled.
In other words, it perpetuates the very thing it purports to alleviate.
It never ceases to amaze me why the government believes that:
Raising the price of things it doesn't want us to consume (tobacco, gasoline, sugar-based soft drinks) by way of a tax will reduce the consumption.
BUT, raising the price of labor by way of a mandated minimum wage will have no effect on the consumption of that commodity.
SMH.
Rant over. Back to regularly-scheduled offseason programming.