You keep making this point over and over, but I don't think you understand the reality of the situation from a business owners perspective.

I'll talk from the perspective of someone who has both earned minimum wage at McDonalds and designed manufacturing robots to replace people.

When I was working for minimum wage, I worked my ass off. We'd retunely serve >$1,000 an hour in business with 10 employees making minimum wage. 10x7 = $70. There is plenty of overhead but when your payroll expense is less than 1/10th of your revenue, would lowering the minimum wage really do much? In our case the limiting factor on how many people were working was literally how many jobs there were. Add in some more poeple, what do they do? Nothing. So all the minimum wage does is set a floor on what they paid us. I was horribly overqualified, so was everyone else, anyone who walks in the door can handle the job, so they would just pay the cheapest people to do that job required by law.

Now fast forward to when I had graduated college and was designing robots, I was working on a system for a production line where the parts cost >$50,000 each. The person it was moving aside (they weren't actually fired) made >$40,000 a year. Much more than minimum wage. The reason for the replacement was that the robot could do it more precisesly and thus waste fewer compononets. The value was not the cost of labor, but the ability of the robot to do something better than what a human can do.

The robot cost a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the person it was replacing only made about 1/5th of that. This was a relatively long pay off project just looking at labor vs robot costs. The real savings was in reducing wasted procduct. So the robot was replacing high skilled labor that was far above minimum wage anyway.

If your argument ever relies on McDonalds replacing people with robots, you're just wrong. Robots are not that cheap and people are not that expensive. Minimum wage is peanuts already, lowering it won't add more workers. Would you really replace the person handing cups out of the window for $5 an hour? What kind of robot would you need with the articulation to pick up a cop, hand it out the window and find the person sitting in their car. Would it really be worth the tens of thousands of dollars to replace a $7 an hour worker? Hell no! That's why we don't have robots at McDonalds. But if the minimum wage was $2 an hour, the guy at the window would be making $2 an hour, and there wouldn't be 2 workers just becuase the minimum wage was that much lower, becuase you only need one guy at the window handing out cups no matter what he costs.

Another example: my uncle owns a gas station in New Jersey, he is required to have paid pump attendants 24/7 by law. He pays them miminimum wage. This barely even factors into his bottom line at all, he believes it lowers the insurance more than it costs him in wages. Yet he has to do it by law, and he has to pay them by law. If minimum wage was lower, he would just hire exactly the same number of people and pay them less. There is no extra work for the extra people. There is no reason for him to pay any more becuase there is no skill required for the job.

It is relatively simple and established economics, but more importantly it is something that you can feel as a business owner (if you are one). For a lot of this stuff there is a set number of people you need to get the job done and price of labor does nothing but affect how much profit you have. Lower prices of labor doesn't change how many people you need at a restaurent or a gas station. There is a minimum and maximum number of people that is effective regardless of cost. Thus minimum wage is helping those people in no skill jobs to have a realistic wage instead of just a race to the bottom.