But that is exactly the point. The group that makes minimum wage to begin with is quite small - and the majority of this group lives in households that make the figures I cited - meaning they are not in poverty.
The BLS stats show that roughly 1.6 million workers in the United States make minimum wage (based on their most recent stats). On that group - 704,000 are above the age of 24. The stats previously cited show that 25% of this group roughly lives at the poverty line - or 176,000 people. Splitting further into this data, it shows 7% of this audience works full time - or 12,320 people.
So the total result is that 12,320 people (based on BLS stats) work full time and live at the poverty line....doesn't seem to be the problem that we are told it is.
I am glad you bring up the elderly. Let's again check the BLS stats. Workers making minimum wage who are 55 or older account for 94,000 workers - this would again be split down into a smaller segment to pull out who exactly lives at the poverty line - but you can quickly get the idea that it is simply not that many people.
If the purpose of a minimum wage hike is to lift people out of poverty we should be honest about the fact that we are talking about a very small audience. There is no reason to blankly raise minimum wage under the guise of fighting poverty when almost no one in the group even lives at the poverty line. It just doesn't make any sense.
The solution is jobs. We need to promote pro-growth, pro-business policies that gets government off the back of businesses and allows them to expand and hire more workers.
The cost to taxpayers if you accept your premise at face value is essentially nothing overall given the negligible number of people earning minimum wage and living at the poverty level. Its all fine and good to view this as an issue - but lets be clear that it is an issue that amounts to maybe a couple million a year throughout the entire country - and is not some billion dollar boondoggle.
