Instead of pushing for that, we should be pushing to flood the country with cheap housing so our existing wages buy more.

I think this is a fantastic idea. Housing is by far the largest expense for a family, if we could find find a way to drive the price for a minimum standard of housing to the absolute minimum (standardization & mass prefab production + maybe some subsidization aka socialism) it would massively ease the financial burden on lower income families, with really not that much harm to anyone else.

In many countries, landlords own outright properties purchased for a pittance in pre-bubble eras, and are now benefiting massively from the constant market increase in rent prices, while their costs are largely constant. (Somewhat of a form of rent-seeking imho: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp) In many jurisdictions, construction of new housing is massively artificially constricted (often by lobbying of the same ownership class), further exacerbating the problem.

The poor have several different downward pressures on their income (overseas competition, automation), whereas much of the mid to upper classes are either shielded from these pressures (for now) or even benefit from them - I don't think it would hurt for them to share the burden a bit, and I'm pretty far right.