> $15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. There is a greater tolerance for whom you will accept at current wage points.
I don't believe that. People aren't going to dig the ditches and flip the burgers themselves just because it costs them a few $ per hour more now. These people aren't taking part in "charity" jobs that will dissapear if the wages go up, they're still going to stack shelves, they're just going to do it for more $.
Additionally, paying people an actual livable wage I'd suggest makes it more likely they will be reliable. When you're not juggling poverty related health problems with more jobs than it's sensible to have I'd suggest you will perform better at whatever job you do.
> The other effect of a much higher starting wage is you will have people enter the market who did not think the wage was worth their time. The people who cannot be relied on to show up on schedule, quit and want to come back, have some issues in their credit or criminal backgrounds, and more.
I'm not sure I follow you there. It seems that you're saying that there's a band of workers that are unreliable (credit/crimial issues) that are just waiting for wages to go up before they jump into the labor pool, but that the lower paid workers don't have these problems?
> Meaning more reliable candidates will come back in and those who dismissed fast food, warehouse, and retail, jobs as not paying enough will now accept those jobs. You will get some retirees, stay at homes, college kids, and even some recent graduates, coming in.
This seems to contradict what you said in the last paragraph so I might have misunderstood something somewhere. Regardless, I doubt there's a pool of workers who are well enough off that they don't have to currently work who on discovering that the lowest paid jobs in the country now pay a bit more will suddenly want to start work.