the minimum wage is definitely not high enough for a family to maintain a standard of living for America to claim to be one of the richest countries in the world.
But that's not the wage's fault; it's the greedy price-setters who don't believe that the other price-setters will follow suit if they set the prices with profits that they can only afford if everyone else shrinks their profits!
How can we convince ALL the price-setters to set their profits low at-one-time?
One way to do this would be to get the government out of the marketplace! The problem with what you're suggesting is that there are already laws on the books that prevent business from setting their prices too low, as this might be too difficult for competitors to keep up with low prices. So even if a company would have been able to lower their prices because of some novel innovation that allows their workers to be more productive, they have to be careful that the amount they lower prices doesn't make it seem like predatory pricing. We are too worried about the possibility of a monopoly developing and that the company would price-gouge the public once they have attained a monopoly, that we sometimes hurt ourselves in the process... There is such a thing as efficiencies in quantity. If a company can produce as many widgets as they want, they may be able to purchase a machine, software, etc. that can speed up their process allowing them to sell more widgets at a lower price. The cost of that new equipment could get absorbed into the cost of the millions of widgets much more easily without effecting the price so much. However if the government decides that a company making millions of widgets has now monopolized the marketplace and requires the company to be broken up into small companies, now the cost of that new piece of equipment can only be spread over the fewer widgets they are now producing, thereby raising the price of each widget. In fact, if production is stymied too much by government intervention, it may make that new piece of equipment cost-prohibitive and therefore even though the product could be made and sold more cheaply, the government involvement is making everything more expensive than it really needs to be.