Hey, merry christmas. Sorry, I was going to respond to you much sooner, but I've been having a whole bunch of.... technical difficulties. They have now been resolved.
A living wage is a minimum amount of income needed to provide a worker with basic necessities, such that they can live a basic life without government subsidies. It does not literally mean "I need x income or I cannot survive" which would be a subsistence wage. The idea is to lift people out of the feedback loop of poverty.
We've been increasing the minimum wage for decades, and millions of Americans are still living in poverty. We've got to find out what people are doing with all that extra money they get, and why.
Apart from this, there have you considered that a living wage is typically calculated based upon a 40? hour work week. However it is likely that a person who is earning a poverty wage must work more than that (which of course negatively impacts their life and is a part of the feedback loop).
Wasn't aware of that.
I think people need to take a look at the kind of work they're doing. If you're working 40 hours a week behind a cash register, you can't expect to make that much money to begin with, but if you're working 40 hours a week as a doctor, nurse, electrician, plumber, scientist, police, janitor, military, or whatever, you can easily get out of poverty and move up the corporate ladder. Right now, I'm trying to get into a job working for a bank, office, tech company, news company, or an insurance company, all of which pay far more than the minimum wage.
It's getting ridiculous that people are wanting more and more money doing their cheap cash register jobs, and not looking for ways to get into jobs that already pay better.
Raising the minimum wage just means more and more businesses are going to be finding ways to get around it, such as looking for more immigrants to hire under the table or whatever, thus negatively impacting even more lives, and contributing even more to that feedback loop you talked out.