One of the problems of increasing the minimum wage is you have to increase the wages of everyone when it happens; it's simple human nature. The problem isn't what the government sets the wage at, the problem is that there are not enough jobs left that are valuable enough. Manufacturing is the obvious one, but productivity increases have decreased the number of jobs in just about every sector. Solid, middle income jobs are becoming more and more rare - and you can't just magically make low income jobs more valuable, they are what they are. I honestly don't know where to start with a solution, but economic controls from on high rarely, if ever, work, or turn out as expected.