If you ask me, this all comes down to the price of a gallon of gasoline, the ultimate weapon in the war on the middle class. Since the price of gas started going up, the cost of everything else has followed suit. Simple equation: when it costs more to transport goods, suppliers have to pass a lot of that cost down to their buyers (businesses, small and large). Most retail businesses make a small profit on their sales, so they can only eat so much of that cost without passing it on to their customers. This is especially true in the case of restaurants and other low margin businesses (the sort that typically pay minimum wage, because that's all they can afford). The true meaning of trickle down economics....

People that work for minimum wage have long been in a near survival mode, spending the vast majority of their earnings on bare essentials (rent, bills, food, and an occasional bottle of cheap booze or beer to wash down the misery). A notable commodity that fits in that essential category for most people is gasoline. A lot of that cost can be avoided in cities with good public transportation (Seattle's is pretty good), but for many, a car is a necessity to get to work, and even those who can ride a bus to work are subject to constantly rising costs for living essentials.

When I was cooking for a living, I worked a lot of near minimum wage jobs. This was in the mid-90s and early 2000s, when gas cost me an average of about $1.25/gallon. Even at that price, it was a significant expense, but it was bearable. I never had money to throw around, but I had what I needed most of the time, and when I didn't, I just took another part time job until I got back to even. Now that gas costs 3x as much or more, rents are up about 25%, and the cost of food has about doubled, while minimum wage has increased less than 50%, I can't imagine how the current minimum wage would allow a person to sustain even a minimal lifestyle. I think $15/hr. is probably about what it would take to stay fed, clothed, sheltered, and gassed up in Seattle these days, so from the worker's perspective, I think this makes sense.

Then, there is the small business owner's perspective, which is quite different indeed. I never felt like minimum wage was fair compensation for busting my a$$ in hot kitchens, often for 12 or more hours a day, but I fully understood, especially in the case of small, family-owned restaurants, that I was being paid as much as the business could afford to pay me while making modest (at best) profits. I also enjoyed the work most of the time, and that made it seem more worthwhile.

Anyway, the point is that while I think $15 is probably about right for minimum wage in Seattle, I realize that many businesses won't be able to pay it without either giving up their profits (which means going out of business) or raising their prices to a point at which they start losing customers, many of whom are scraping to get by themselves these days, and eventually are forced out of business. That all adds up to more bad news for the middle class, since a large percentage of the middle class has been small business owners all along, and they're steadily losing their ability to compete with big business in almost every major market.

Meanwhile, big oil corporations are enjoying record profits and conspiring with the rail tycoons to flood our seaports with oil and gas destined for points near and far, which will, by the laws of supply and demand, drive up the cost of fuel (and everything that depends on it to get to market) here at home, and traders on Wall Street are all laughing all the way to big banks (actually, most of those guys probably have enough sense not to do business with the big banks, but I had to write that for effect).

So who's the greater threat to small business and the middle class: a socialist city council member in Seattle who wants people to have enough money to sustain themselves (okay, maybe a little more than that), or corporate 'Merica and their government puppets?