Resolved: Minimum wages in the United States should be raised to ensure the welfare of its people

I stand in firm negation of the resolution.My opponent stated that my first contention fell because of the fact that even if adolescents lost jobs to more skilled workers that it wouldn't matter because there parents will be making more, and he also states that many are working so that they can help support their families. My opponent doesn't seem to have looked at the statistics close enough to realize that neither of these are really the case in this situation. According to heritage.org, "Minimum-wage workers under 25 are typically not their family’s sole breadwinners. Rather, they tend to live in middle-class households that do not rely on their earnings—their average family income exceeds $65,000 a year." This illustrates that the families of these adolescents that are working for these jobs wouldn't NEED to benefit from higher minimum wages. To address his argument that stated that the reason that adolescents are working at MW is to support their families, is the fact that many of these people ages 16-25 are working to learn skills that will be valuable to them in the workplace later on in life. MW wage jobs gives them the essential skills that will help them become more desirable in the job market. Because the statistics show that adolescents aren't working at MW jobs to support their family, my opponent's refutation to this part of my first contention should be disregarded.Attempting to refute another part of my refutation, my opponent also stated that the 1996 legislation is in fact applicable to this situation because of the fact that no matter the state of the economy, the effects (of increased job growth) will be the same today, and that the varying economy doesn't change MW's positive effect. However this is untrue and quite illogical. Think about it, if employers in a good economy have relatively large amount of money, they will be able to spend more. Likewise, if they have a small amount of money they won't be able to spend it. So, my opponent's argument against this final part of my first contention is very irrational and should also be disregarded. To my second contention, my opponent argued that people will still have the incentive to get an education because good jobs make 10-30 dollars more than minimum wage. He also said that families are benefiting because it is hard to find a job, so because of the lack of jobs they should be able to find a minimum wage paying job that also allows them to live off of this salary. However, there are more errors with these arguments. 1.) The fact that good jobs may or may not pay 10-30 dollars more than MW (haven't seen any statistical evidence to verify this) doesn't really work as a refutation to this argument, because of the fact that it doesn't show that people without educations will still prosper because of MW increasing. The reason that I stated my argument about the incentive of getting an education being removed with MW increasing, is to show that people won't need to attend college in order for them to be able to get a well paying job. If we give them 15 dollars an hour off the bat, they won't need to go and attend a 4 year college to get a 17 dollar an hour paying job because this won't be much of a benefit in their eyes. 2.) (he said that raising MW is good because many people can't find jobs) Very few people actually have to support a family living off of minimum wage. Often, people making minimum wage are providing a secondary income to their families. Very rarely is the stereotype that the people making minimum wages are single parents raising a child actually occurring. If we look at the actual statistics, the arguments I have just stated are backed. More than 75% of people over the age of 25 live in a family that is above the poverty line (so they don't really need to support a family) and only 4 percent of MW workers are single parents working full time. Again if we look at this from a cost-benefit analysis, we can see the negative cost (hurt economy) for the families of the 75%(families with MW workers above poverty line) far outweighs the 24%(families with MW workers below poverty line) that would benefit. Also, the 4% of single parents that are struggling to live off of minimum wage does not justify hurting the economy (by harming small businesses job growth) for the other 96%.I am sorry that the Pro didn't get enough time to refute all of my points or defend any of his, but I didn't set the time limit for arguments so...Anyhow, I still stand in firm negation of the resolution.