What's going on with raising the minimum wage

[eridani]

8. Seattle Is Wealthy Enough to Pay Human Service Workers a Living Wage

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/opinionnw/2014/04/25/15-minimum-wage-nonprofits/

I’d been meaning to comment on this Jonathan Martin post for quite some time, but got distracted by my non-Seattle-Times-bashing pursuits. Writing on the paper’s editorial board blog, Martin echoes a trope that has grown quite popular with minimum wage concern-trolls these days: that a $15 minimum wage would ironically hurt poor people, by making it too expensive to provide vital human services!

As Martin correctly points out, human services are largely provided by low-wage workers—some of them college educated social workers who make only $12 to $13 an hour themselves. A $15 minimum wage would indeed cost Seattle’s not-for-profit human services agencies millions of dollars a year in additional labor costs. So Martin defends these “abysmal” low wages as “just the financial reality of holding together the human services safety net.”

Responding on Facebook, millionaire minimum wage advocate Nick Hanauer aptly describes Martin’s reasoning as “silly”:

Building an economy that generates huge human services needs by impoverishing most people by underpaying them, and then builds infrastructure to do damage control [on what] this poverty creates by employing people at poverty wages to do it, is economically inefficient, socially ineffective, and morally dubious.

If the argument made by Martin is correct, that raising the minimum wage is bad for the city because then we will be able to pay for less human services, then by definition he must also believe that if the minimum wage went down it would be good for the city because then we would be able to pay for more human services.