Why shouldn't someone working as a fry cook be able to live on his salary? It's not dangerous to have a system where not everyone needs a university degree to earn a living.
He should be able to live; that doesn’t (for me) extend to “rent the average 1BR apartment for less than 35% of his gross pay, by law”.
He's got more money, so he can afford more expensive stuff, increasing demand, which increases prices, and now your fry cook can no longer live on his salary.
Do you want to respond by raising wages again? You're in a never ending loop.
This does not necessarily follow from the previous statement, and may even be completely unrelated.
The only way you keep this person's wage down is increase supply - have lots of people with university degrees. But that's not the real world, in the real world most people are not able to get a degree.
Again, the second part of this statement does not necessarily follow from the first. There are countless ways of tweak supply/demand of McJobs, such as low minimum wages resulting in a glut of retail locations , changing total hours non-degreed workers (read high-schoolers) can work, adjusting rules on temp workers, community college intakes, etc.
There a many variables, and increasing minimum wage impacting a subset of (mostly unskilled[0]) workers doesn't automatically mean an increase in income for skilled jobs.
0. I dislike the term, but it conveys my intended meaning. "Jobs that require no prior training" is unwieldy.