Regardless of the mandated minimum wage, business has moved on. The federal minimum wage is mostly meaningless, these days. Only 1.6% of our hourly workforce is actually making minimum wage. The free market has already mandated businesses to pay higher wages, without coercive government meddling. This whole hot-button topic is just a politically divisive ploy, to divide The People and drive low-information, single-issue voters to the polls.
There are those who would have you believe that if the MW were abolished, evil businesses would begin paying their workers 3rd world wages. This is demonstrably untrue. If that were the case, then a large percentage of hourly workers would already be at the minimum, right now. Instead, it's 1.6%.... Imagine that.
There are those who would have you believe that there are millions of hurting Americans who are desperately trying to support a family on a MW job. Also demonstrably untrue, just by looking at the
BLS numbers. There are only about 1.3 million workers making the minimum, out of some 77 million total hourly workers. Of those, 705,000 are 16-24 years old, almost all of whom (697,000) are single. There are only 88,000 MW workers who are married and living with their spouse.
http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg773_500_350.jpgEconomic rules state that if the price of a commodity, in this case labor, goes UP, then demand for that commodity goes DOWN. So, increasing the MW, will theoretically mean fewer available MW jobs. Higher labor costs will necessarily drive up COGS (cost of goods and services), which means inflation. Both of these hurt the 93 million unemployed and fixed-income Americans. However, as I stated above, MW workers are such a tiny piece of the big picture, none of this really matters, nor would its effect be really measurable, unless the increase was really large.
