Is there a college student or recent graduate who doesn't believe this? (Updated)

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UPDATE Let David Strom break the news to her and to her believers:

What is important is that money is an abstraction, and it is abstracted from value. Ultimately, the value of money is tied to the goods and services that can be purchased with it, so if you expand the money supply without expanding the goods and services, the only thing that changes is the dollar's value. Nobody gets any richer unless more actual wealth is created. 

That's why increases in the minimum wage are a fool's solution to a perennial problem: some people make more money than others, and people whose labor or contribution is low on the value scale--say, fry cooks whose sole skill is being surly while making fries--will not make sufficient money to satisfy their desires. 

People in Oakland are not poor because they aren't paid enough. They are poor because they produce little of value compared to those around them in one of the wealthiest places in the world--San Francisco and the Silicon Valley region. When you are competing with Googlers for resources, being a minimum wage worker is a real problem. You are competing for limited resources with people who can outbid you by a wide margin. 

That doesn't make you a bad person--although there are LOTS of bad people in Oakland, which truly IS a s**thole--it just means that you live in the wrong place and have the wrong skills and likely temperament to thrive there. Economically speaking, Oakland's land would be put to better use providing housing for people who are more productive, but economics is not the only factor in this world, nor should it be. 

Poor people have to live somewhere, and Oakland is where poor people live in the Bay Area. But their poverty will not be relieved by magic bullets like an increase in the minimum wage. If the wage goes to $50/hour, those people will become unemployed tomorrow, and businesses will bail immediately.