I think it's also a case of those higher tier jobs don't really exist like they used to. I've had plenty of offers over the past few years of jobs that required some specialized skills, degrees, or both, and barely paid more than minimum wage. The worst of the batch was a specialty battery pack company that wanted a shop manager, technician, maintenance tech, failure analysis engineer, purchasing, shipping, inventory manager - essentially everything except design the product - for the princely sum of $13 an hour. The last recruiter I spoke with about this position (used to come up about every 3-4 months, company got eaten by a competitor) just sighed and said that "yes, we've told them over and over this is not a good wage, and they're going to continue to get turnover." Mike is partly right, a higher minimum wage is just going to continue skewing things, but the other side of the coin is the companies that want it all for minimum wage.