Raising the minimum wage

I got an e-mail from a liberal think tank this morning: "Progressives are making raising the minimum THE top women's issue of 2014."

Oh goody. I wonder how many unemployed or underemployed women will benefit from that? Recently I read that in Illinois there were 5,000 jobs and 10,000 needing those jobs, but none of them had the skills to do those jobs. Even with a GED, most could only read at 3rd or 4th grade level, and those without a GED didn't want to spend the time and effort to get one when welfare benefits paid better than the jobs! And those jobs were above minimum wage!

Women need to finish high school and they need to be married before having children. That's what improves life for women, not an increase in the minimum, which will take a chunk of their government benefits giving them no advantage at all.

If a woman is earning $15,000/year at a minimum wage job and qualifies for SNAP, EITC, housing, Medicaid, etc., and then is raised to $20,000, and loses half of the government aid, where is her gain? $20,000 hardly improves her life and chances of moving up.