> no reason for all of them, or even a majority, to loose more in benefits than they gain in higher pay. makes no sense.

I'm not sure you understand the argument here: A job is a bundle of benefits. There's a money component but there's also all sorts of tangible and intangible other factors that are of value to the worker and cost money to the employer. Other factors might include things like: Free food. Free training. Company-provided uniforms. A well-lit work environment. Flexible hours. Sick leave. Vacation time (paid or unpaid). A well-lit and clean and safe work environment. Job security. A 401k plan. Health coverage. Convenient employee parking. Educational assistance. Prescription drug discounts.

Suppose the value of your work to the company is $16/hour, of which you get paid $10 in salary, $5 in benefits, and the company keeps $1 as profit. If the minimum wage is increased to $15/hour, the only way the company can afford to keep you on is to get rid of ALL the benefits; they would then pay you $15 in salary and $0 in benefits.

The problem is that if you had WANTED that deal you could have BARGAINED for it. You CHOSE a 10/5 salary/benefit split because that's what you preferred, so when the government forces you to take a 15/0 split instead you are being forced to accept a deal you like LESS than your prior option. You're worse off.

Yes, you're making $15/hour, but now you have to work HARDER and the work conditions are worse and the timing is less flexible and the schedule is less relaxed and the job security is nonexistent and you have to pay for your own food and uniform and training and so on where before those were all provided. It is now a miserable job even at the higher wage, where before it was an okay job with a merely not-great wage.

But wait, I hear you cry: "minimum wage workers have no negotiating power so they can't just demand exactly what they want!"

Ah, but they kind of can. They do so not by arguing with employers directly but merely by CHOOSING employers. When considering whether to work at McDonald's or Burger King, workers look at the whole package and pick the one they like MORE. (The company cares about the SUM, not how much is salary versus benefits - it just wants to get the best workers they can at a low OVERALL cost) Over time, the company that offers a better overall blend of benefits+salary will find it easier to hire the people they need so the packages offered will tend to evolve to best meet the needs of the average workers.

Then the government steps in and says screw that, you can't HAVE those benefits anymore, because the company can't afford to give them to you along with your new higher salary.

If the minimum wage went from $10 to $15, people whose value to the company was between those two simply lose their jobs; people whose value to the company was $16 or more keep their job but the job is now a really crappy one they (according to revealed preference) probably like less than what they had before. So they aren't actually made better off by the change, even though they got a raise.

Which means there's no net benefit to the higher wage, only costs.

> key word being "presumably", which is, given the election results in Seattle, apparently not true

Election results are mostly about signaling and group affiliation. They don't tell us anything about what minimum wage workers want, because minimum wage workers are such a small portion of the electorate.

> measurement is king. if any losses will occur, they should be measurable.

Bad study design could easily render them unmeasurable in any particular study. And most minimum wage increases are essentially designed to be nearly unmeasurable by the sort of study you're thinking of. Yes, the theory says that, all else being equal, businesses will tend to respond to higher labor costs by such measures as: cutting benefits, cutting shifts (so there are fewer hours but not necessarily fewer jobs), investing in automation, shrinking or failing to expand, not opening (as many) new businesses. But theory doesn't say exactly WHEN this will happen or even in which business sectors. An exceptionally stupid study design might compare just the number of jobs right before the law takes effect to one year later, and find no effect. But wait: the law was argued about in the legislature for two years and then passed but didn't take effect until the next calendar year, and took effect in multiple small stages. A smart, pro-active businessman who knew he needed to make changes might see the writing on the wall and start making those business changes before the law even passes much less takes effect, confounding that study design. On the other hand, a lazy, re-active businessman might just suck it up and change nothing, losing some money for a year or two after the change, either hoping to make it work or hoping the law gets repealed. Eventually he is driven to make those changes but does so after the study window, again confounding the results. In short, what sort of delayed or premature response we should expect for a particular sector and a particular sort of legal change is an empirical question - you might have to run one study to find the shape of the expected response and then run another to estimate its magnitude. Doing the sort of thing Card/Krueger did is almost guaranteed to miss most of the signal, even if it's really there.