Quote: Minimum wage jobs are supposed to be entry-level positions where unskilled workers can gradually learn a useful skill.

WRONG again... jeez you seem to be wrong so often it's amazing you keep typing out these articles.

President Roosevelt, the night before the signing the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, warned: "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, ...tell you...that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry."

Yet we have current well-to-do's howling calamity if we raise the current minimum to a more living-wage level.

The minimum wage was NOT designed to be an "entry level" wage for those with no skills. It evolved that way as the economy improved and wages rose for other types of work. However, due to primarily Republican/libertarian approaches to the economy especially since 1981, wages have been flat for most Americans even as those with $1000-a-day incomes garnered bigger and bigger bank accounts.

Too many people are being forced to work lower level jobs, and often more than one, to make ends meet. One estimate is that at the least, a real living wage would have to be just over $16/hour (or $68,000 per year)

Quote: During an address FDR gave about one of his many economic salvation packages, he explained that “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” Roosevelt intended this rate to be “more than a bare subsistence level.” The minimum wage was created expressly to ensure that people of all skill-levels, if they worked, could “earn a decent living” off those wages—thus, a living wage.