According to the Feds, the real minimum wage in Harlingen, TX needs to be twice as high as in NYC - Why?

President Obama and the Democrats want to increase the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00.  They argue that the current minimum isn't a 'living wage'.  But that begs the question of living wage where?  The minimum wage is a national rate so presumably it is established in connection to the national cost of living.  In places with higher costs of living, the minimum wage will be more 'inadequate'.  For example, the national minimum of $7.25 will only buy the national equivalent of $3.90 worth of goods and services in high cost NYC.  Contrast that with low cost Harlingen, TX, where the national minimum wage has an effective value of $8.73.  Even in  San Francisco which has the highest statutory minimum wage in the country at $10.55, the city's high costs mean that it will only buy the equivalent of $6.43 in goods and services.

This results in the paradox that Harlingen which has one of the least educated, lowest income work forces  has the highest effective minimum wage of any city in the nation, more than twice that of relatively rich New York city.  If your goal is to use a minimum wage to 'help' the 'working poor' then this outcome is nonsense on stilts.

So why is it that blue state Democrats  howl the loudest for a nationwide increase yet tolerate much lower effective minimum wages in their own back yards?  For example, for NYC to have an effective minimum wage equal to a national $9.00 (an outcome that virtually all NYC politicians claim to want) the minimum there would need to be $16.74 an hour.

 After all, NYC, SFO, LA and others are all impeccably liberal places, "compassionate" to the core and utterly dominated by Democrats in virtually every city, county, legislature, courtroom, media outlet, college, school and even most taco stands.  Surely if they wanted to establish an effective minimum wage equal to a national $9 or even $7.25 rate for their own neighbors and employees they could.....oops.  Now I see.

It's all so progressive.

Postscript:  Of course I think that all minimum wages are nonsense and as I said before, national minimum wages are that on stilts.  I am just asking for once that our glorious avatars of the downtrodden demonstrate a level of consistency that doesn't immediately define them as cynical power gluttons.  Just doing so once would go a long ways to reduce my towering, intergalactic level of cynicism over any 'compassionate' policy proposed by any Democrat anywhere.  Ever.