about the "asshole" thing. We all have days like that.

It's true that it's mostly the lower and middle income ranges that will pay for most of the increase. But then, since that defines "the 99%", there are a lot more people in that group. And besides, when did we start to think of cheap fast food as some sort of Constitutional right? If we stop artificially depressing the cost of labor in an industry and its prices rise, so what? Isn't that the free market in action?

Frank asked whether it's about sticking it to "Wall Street". No, they're not the object, but certainly it's the "investing class" that by any standard of justice should have to shoulder the cost of higher pay for workers through lower dividends. Like your suggestion about raising taxes, it's all about how wealth in our society is distributed. There is no perfectly free market, anywhere; and so the proper debate is over how the rules should be set to maximize fairness for all.

This whole discussion has developed a bit of tunnel vision over the idea of a "living wage". I'd be just as happy, if not more so, if the lowest-paid tier of workers gets back the right to form unions and take action on their own to improve their lot, no government action required. I know unions are considered to be first-class demons from hell in the eyes of conservatives, but frankly, I see unions as just as much artifacts of free markets as large corporations--the size of one balances the size of the other. A world with giant corporations without unions to push back is an oligarchy. (I'd be even happier if we broke up corporations larger than a $billion/year in revenue, but we know that's never gonna happen. Next best thing is to play the balance-of-power game.)

The United States has a fundamentally sick socioeconomic system; we have the distribution of wealth of a banana republic, and we seem to have entered an era of having all the stability and good government of a banana republic. I think we can address a whole range of our social, economic, and political problems by addressing the inequality of wealth.