Minimum Wage should keep pace with inflation

My apologies for the forfeit, and I appreciate Con's eagerness! Con expresses understandable concern for the manual laborers of a workforce structured to favor skilled labor over below-minimum-wage labor, but suppressing the below-minimum-wage labor does not only affect workers, it also affects consumers, who cannot purchase cheaply produced goods and thus have more money to purchase high-quality, durable goods. This may suppress 1-yr GDP growth, but increase 5-yr or 10-yr GDP growth. The vending machine may be put into mass production, but this creates a far more efficient workforce than attempting to replace every vending machine with a human-run lemonade stand.Regarding the 600 workers who produce exterior automotive lighting, they all require training in engineering convention and principles of science because 1) it's very difficult to efficiently coordinate any area of expertise with 599 other people, 2) the wiring has to coordinate with boolean programming that extends through other parts of the car, it may have to respond to temperature changes that affect how much power runs through each wire and affect the brightness of the lights, the lights have to be bright enough for fog, dim enough for night, and 3) the glass for the lighting has to utilize principles of light absorption, reflection, and transmission, it has to cast light expansively and narrowly in various levels, and it has to protect the light bulb. My point being, industries of mechanical or other modern products rely on the evolving sophistication of their workforce. If we allowed our worker wages to stagnate because their labor is cheap, their labor will remain cheap as their competitors in other corners of the globe race ahead to build the next great design.Employers can only make an educated guess on what a worker will produce before hiring, and I really like how Con verbalized the difference between a college educated versus a workforce educated employee. It brings to light a potential flaw in how I verbalized this debate: are we discussing minimum wage, or wages keeping pace with inflation? I hope to correct this in the future, but as of Con's phrasing in round 1 acceptance, this is a discussion about a company's post-hiring obligation for its employee salaries to keep pace with inflation, given minimum wage. Con is correct that we have less and less people working at or below the nominal federal minimum. This is because inflation is diluting the the real value of the federal minimum. It is becoming easier to obtain a $10 / hour job because $10 is dropping in value. The same set of companies that pay their employees double what they paid 30 years ago also charge their customers triple what they did 30 years ago. He is correct that some companies, such as Costco, which pays its employees quite well to take care of its customers, and these employees in turn shop at Costco rather than Walmart, whose employees struggle to pay the rent. This all supports the principle that an economy or company that cares for its workers will be taken care of by its workers.Con and I both agree that real wealth is truly something to collectively strive for. He advises workforce strategies for fighting inflation, and I hope to dicuss that more in depth with him in the future, but this debate is about how to respond to inflation.Assembly lines and other forms of low-skill labor are good strategies for a stagnate economy, a closed system, a GDP that needs no exports, a workforce of software engineers who don't compete with India, an industry where Ford need not compete with Toyota or BMW, a never-ending 20th century in which American farming is the primary agricultural provider for dozens of other nations. But growing and competing requires leaps in construction, engineering and science, and great feats of engineering create "transitional unemployment," which is healthy for the long-term economy. The "transitionally" unemployed are not unqualified, they are the potential for the economy's next step. The economy might have a low-wage demand for their low-level work, but if low-level wages are suspended, the economy's demand must be spent elsewhere, on something of greater long-term value. The correlation between minimum wage and unemployment was invented by brilliant economists who investigated the economy by imagining closed scenarios. Empirical research has shown only short-term correlation between minimum wage and unemployment.I thank Con for an excellent debate.