The problem with artificial increases to the minimum wage is inflation. It's basic economics. If businesses are now having to pay their entry-level and unskilled workers $15 per hour, they're going to have to float that somehow. Then you're going to have all of your entry-level management and semi-skilled workers who are making $12-15 per hour now and bumping their pay, and do you think the guys doing twice the work at the $15-18 per hour level are going to be happy with their pay now that the 16-year-old scrubbing the bathroom floor makes as much/almost as much per hour as they do? It's a ripple effect up the chain where everybody from $20/hour on down wants a raise of some sort, and there are more than a few mid-sized local businesses out there where the person signing the checks is lucky to bring that home at the end of the day. They have to either raise prices and lose to the likes of Walmart, IHOP, Olive Garden and Amazon, cut back staff dramatically and raise everyone's workload, cut back benefits for companies already offering them, or just close. Meanwhile, those of us lucky enough to be removed from those income brackets will see the cost of everything spike. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

If you want to raise the minimum wage to $15 over the course of 10-15 years, fine. It's a jump of roughly 7-10% per year, well ahead of inflation but not so much that curve would immediately crush businesses. Telling a local restaurant that it has to go from paying $2.13 plus tips to paying seven times that amount would kill almost any local restaurant.

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