I had a discussion with a girl I know about minimum wage (idk what her politics are exactly bc she's inconsistent but if I had to guess I'd say soc dem) and she was saying Biden's plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 was the most ambitious plan in world history. She explained that with $15 min wage the US will have the highest minimum wage in the world, this was the best way to do it bc if we switched to $24 min wage overnight then small businesses would completely shut down and leave a large amount of the workforce unemployed and allow corporations like Amazon to take over.
I'll admit I'm newish to leftism and didn't really have an answer to this. Is there an argument from the left against this? also sorry to mods if I posted in the wrong place, wasn't exactly sure where this should go
in addition to this, there's tons of grants issued by the government all the time, as well as subsidies of various sorts for all kinds of industries.
if they wanted to prevent independent businesses from biting the dust it would be easy enough to gradually increase the minimum wage which businesses have to pay employees while subsidizing the difference, in order to provide an actual living wage. they're of course not going to do that, but they could.