I don't have any suggestions...
I don't have any suggestions, this is a complex topic.
I do think it's actually good for the economy to "raise up" people that are just scraping by, however it's done. Quite simply, someone who has money "left over" at the end of the month has money to spend (which increases economic activity) or save (which should help later, either when they by a big ticket item later, or when they retire and actually have something saved up to retire on.) Someone who works hard, but ends up with enough to pay rent, utilities (electricity, heat, water, trash) and food but then has nothing left over, has nothing to spend.
So, the problem with doing everything via "the dole", well, I saw this in person. A friend of mine years back was making like $8 an hour, and the boss offered him a dollar an hour raise. He pointed out, he was receiving low income benefits, and the way they were structured he would have had to recieve a raise to $12 an hour to make up for the loss of benefits! It's a problem when one can make the same income doing nothing versus long, hard hours at a crappy, low-paying job, people don't have an incentive to work.
As for raising the minimum wage... first off, I must address inflation. The US CPI (consumer price index) is useless as an estimate of inflation; since social security, and a bunch of other gov't spending, is indexed to increase at the rate of CPI increase, since 1980 the feds have been gaming the system to keep CPI-measured inflation artificially low. A primary technique is "hedonomics". This follows the theory "when items get more expensive, consumers will by less expensive substitutes"... and they have, they replaced steak with hamburger, some electronics items with cheaper equivalents, they play games like put a top-of-the-line ipod on there so that it's price can decrease 90% over a number of years, masking increases in other products... and so on. Using current CPI charts, the claim is there was DEFLATION in 2009 and inflation has been like 1-3% a year otherwise. Using 1980 CPI charts, inflation has averaged around 7.5% recently (quite low around 2009, and higher after that.)
Given the 1980-method CPI... so the minimum wage set in 2009 was $7.25. Getting $7.25/hour now is equivalent to $4.80 an hour then. Given the high inflation rate, it'd be tough at best to actually get by on $7.25 an hour, it could well be time for another minimum wage increase. But, I also don't see any jobs locally actually PAYING minimum wage, the lowest I see locally is like $9 an hour.
The odd thing is, I've read more and more recently about businesses who have not upped their pay in years complaining "there are no qualified applicants out there". Even Amazon said to expect "1 day shipping" to take at least 4 days to ship as the holidays approach, because they can't find people to pack shipping boxes for them. So someone asked the Amazon rep, "have you tried offering more pay? Your pay is very low". The answer? "No, and we don't intend to." WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT THAT? It seems to be a SERIOUS economic breakdown, a breakdown of the natural laws of economic equilibrium, when jobs pay so low that nobody will fill the positions, but the employers will just leave the positions unfilled rather than pay a reasonable wage. I'm curious if, longer term, these businesses will suck it up and start to pay better, or just keep on whining and let their service degrade from being understaffed?