Progressive Politics

Honestly, if minimum wage goes up, the cost of living goes up with it, putting us back to where we started. We need the cost of living to go down instead. Maybe we should force certain business sectors to be non-profit businesses, ones that match with the 4 needs: shelter, food, water, and air. If they can't profit by a large margin, then there won't be monopolies, duopolies, etc, it will create more small business competition, and the competition will hopefully drive prices down.

EDIT: Getting more attention than I expected tbh. I've lived through and experienced several minimum wage increases, and rent constantly going up. The latter is due to greedy landlords knowing they can leech another dollar off of you, so they do until you're destitute. I'm not saying that other factors can't also increase rent.

The suggestion above is meant to attack those profiting by an unnecessarily large amount, which you'd think more Lemmy users would be behind, but somehow this is being seen as "pro-billionaire" rhetoric, which it isn't. Attack the profiteering of landlords first, as well as others areas in which we need to live and get by (list above is not fully exhausted, but a good starting point imo), and then balance out cost of living with raising the minimum wage after. You raise minimum wage beforehand, you're just shifting money from the billionaire paying your paycheck to the billionaire profiting off of necessary life expenses instead.

Someone mentioned how this didn't happen in Mexico, which is interesting. I still need to read up on it and maybe see what factors contributed to rent not increasing.