Holy shit, 2500$/mo minimum wage? What-the-fuck. That doesn't correspond with any ideology other than.. stupidism.
It's all being based off of an economic report that shows that minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation and that if we want to balance it back out to where it was in the 50's, we need to go up to AT LEAST $15/hr. Honestly, I'm torn. Current minimum wage really isn't a living wage in the greater Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area, unless you can also afford to commute up to or beyond 2.5 hours a day (regardless of whether you commute by public transit or personal vehicle, and as badly funded as our transit system is, the cost per person is about the same regardless of method). With all of the gentrification that's going on in the poorer neighborhoods, housing that's affordable on 2 minimum wage salaries is getting pushed farther and farther from the city centers (we have 3 of them) and unfortunately, because those three centers form a triangle, it's even getting to be too expensive to live between any of the city centers, so you really have to hope you can find a job on the north side of Seattle, the east side of Bellevue, or the south side of Tacoma, and can then afford to move to a suburb or X-burb that's close to that side of that city center. Gods forbid that you should become unemployed and only be able to find a job on the far side of the city center farthest from where you live, or you'll wind up commuting 5 hours out of the day.
On the other hand, the far side of the state, $15.00/hr is a quite comfortable standard of living, so the state minimum wage has probably been kept artificially low for several decades, because they have most of the land-mass and we have most of the population.
And then there's the fact that while a lot of people seem to think that minimum wage earners are high school kids or people trying to pick up some spare cash while they go to college, that just isn't true anymore. Do we just tell a senior citizen who worked for 40+ years at a major manufacturing plant, only to see their pension get eliminated when the company went bankrupt or restructured or was bought out by a competitor, that had to go back and work a minimum wage fast food job to pay their bills, that they don't deserve to live comfortably? But I'm not sure that minimum wage is the correct method to fix all of the various problems we have as a workforce.