Can someone answer my question about the minimum-wage hike?

[PETRUS]

109. You're a compendium of bad arguments.

The oil shocks are not a good example. First of all, the price of oil in the 70s quadrupled in a short time. Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2020 involves annual increases of about 20%. This is a difference of orders of magnitude. It's as if you're flying into a panic over a weather forecast of a few inches of precipitation because you can recall a storm that dumped a couple of feet of rain and caused flooding. Also, the increase in oil prices was triggered by a sharp reduction in supply. The US economy is currently experiencing a lack of demand. These problems are opposite in character, and flattening the income curve would help to address the current problem.

So far your tactics have involved bringing up teenagers, stoking anxieties about the fate of small businesses and less affluent communities, responding to specific proposals to raise wages by x by saying "if x, then why not x+y," and insisting that because other nations don't have current minimum wages that high in nominal or PPP terms (ignoring the open question of what policy will be in those places in five years) that we shouldn't either. None of it is convincing, none of it is empirically sound, and I doubt it's lost on many readers here that this rhetoric is identical to the kind of crap emanating from openly right-wing sources.