I just don't understand this debate, and whenever I try, I'm left extremely frustrated by how little is understood outside of partisan BS. My big fear is that this view that it will have any positive impact is too optimisitic, because more money per employee X less employees is not guaranteed to be a good thing for the very people these policies aim to help.

Fundamentally, I have so many questions, but no one seems able to answer them, and attempts always end up a disaster. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se... is a great example. Here is the summary:

> I don’t envy the backlash this team is going to face for daring to present results that will be seen as heresy. I know that so many people just desperately want to believe that the minimum wage is a free lunch. It’s not. These job losses will only get worse as the minimum wage climbs higher, and this team is working on linking to demographic data to examine who the losers from this policy are. I fully expect that these losses are borne most heavily by low-income and minority households.

But it gets worse. The city knew that the results of the trial were going to be bad, passed them on to what is essentially an advocacy group who ended up publishing before said study: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-obje... All of which is correct in timeline, but the specifics of which are impossible (for me) to disambiguate.

I have no idea what the correct answer is here, BTW, but it really shouldn't be hard to have data for the question "does a higher minimum wage help or hurt people? If so, which ones?"

Here are some questions no resource seems able to answer definitively:

Does a minimum wage hike:

- decrease hours worked per employee?

- Decrease total employees?

- What is the net effect of that? And to whom?

Less general, if the problem is not enough jobs, how will higher wages move the dial? If there are lots of jobs, pay still might not matter (see last point), but if it isn't the issue, how do these laws help?

Why is less minimum wage employees a good thing? If we put that figure at minimum wage +=10%, less employees in that bracket just means you don't create jobs for the poor, doesn't it? The companies named by Bernie at least try to employ uneducated/poor people. Will bills like Bernie's likely encourage more businesses to deal with the poor?

I can't imagine why any company would want to employ people who are, to be as controversial as possible, more likely to be racist, homophobic, uneducated Trump supporters. Not voters, I mean out and out supporters. Why bother, when you can have a company of woke individuals in a city with nice food and like minded liberals, who won't get you bad headlines in newspapers that parents of your kid's friends read?

Why pick on the one FAANG company that actual employs minimum wage Americans at any scale? How many minimum wage employees does Google have? Heck, lets go elsewhere, what about Goldman Sacks? Why didn't Bernie go after Goldman Sacks, and demand they increase their attempts to employ the underserved?

It is really a weird world where employing rich, privileged PhDs is a free pass, but creating any jobs for poor people is a PR disaster, and I'm not sure how it is supposed to help.

Or I could be way off base, and this is the best approach, as many companies can't/won't ever create many minimum wage jobs, so why apply a lever there at all? Could be the best chance is to make life hard for companies that do have a need for cheap labour, and negotiate for the best outcomes for their lowly paid workers, while strengthening welfare to cover the costs for a few that would miss out.

THAT is why this is infuriating - I have no idea what is right, wrong, up or down, and I really wish there was solid data either way that we could optimise for.