Have you considered why the cost of living is so high? If everyone in the community made a million dollars a year but the housing supply was artificially restricted so that way people had to pay six-figure monthly rents due to supply-and-demand factors, then even a million a year wouldn’t be enough. Under your logic, that community would be completely devoid of any businesses except those that could pay even higher multi-million salaries, since “the business is unsustainable.”

Where there are definitely cases where people are being underpaid and exploited, the high cost of living isn’t caused by people being underpaid. In fact, higher wages without an increase in the amount of goods available to purchase means that prices will go up. It’s the dog chasing its own tail.

We need to address the high cost of living not by giving everybody a raise, but by fighting NIMBYism, building more housing, and stopping policies that erode the value of our currency, making it harder and harder for people to keep up.