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The direct juxtaposition of this criticism

> This seems like an awfully broad conclusion to draw.

and this anecdote

> It is indisputable that minimum wage kills or exports some jobs (I know this is a fact because my company is planning to add fewer low wage employees and contractors in our local area based largely on minimum wage changes)

is excellent. Admittedly early data about a major metropolitan economy? Pfft. A single anecdote? The basis for claiming that an empirical claim is indisputably true.

Sounds like your company runs a pretty marginal business. A worker that is making $10/hr ($20K / year ) now makes $15 / hr or $30K /year doesn't add the $10+K in extra value.

When I hear about companies that are not "adding jobs because of minimum wage", I go back later and look in the news reports.

Invariably:

1. the company was doing badly already and use the minimum wage, tax increases, etc. to excuse their internal business difficulties.

2. the companies competitors are some how immune to the minimum wage increase and those competitors are expanding and hiring,

3. OR the company in question quietly really did hire more people because surprise, surprise, higher pay resulted in more discretionary income to spend and business was up.

In a properly functioning free market, the company should be doing badly! They might like to earn a nice fat profit, but that isn't what the rest of us like. Competition should get rid of that. Having business difficulties is the expected norm.

So point #1 should normally be true, and any change that makes business more difficult should normally cause business failures and resulting job loss.

It is also indisputable that increasing the minimum wage puts more money into the economy, it's a clear stimulation. And our economy to a large extent is dependent on consumer spending. The increase in spending, vs the fewer jobs with higher minimum wags - that's the complicated question.

You dispute yourself what you call indisputable in your own comment! Fewer jobs means potentially less money in the economy (and theory says that in most cases, more money is lost from fewer jobs than gained from higher pay).

Employers at burgers Inc hire enough people to make and serve the quantity of burgers they expect to sell. If more people can afford to buy burgers they hire more people not less.

The idea that quantity of labor demanded decreases with increased labor costs is oversimplified and ignores reality.

Or the employers decide it now makes sense to invest in infrastructure or automation so that fewer or perhaps even no workers are required. Elevator attendants are the classic example.

Automation gets progressively cheaper compared to human labor anyway increasing wages barely moves the turn over point where automation is cheaper.

> > whether higher minimum wages were going to kill jobs. The early data is in, and so far it doesn’t look like they do."

> This seems like an awfully broad conclusion to draw.

Why? We have mountains of evidence that supports that conclusion, and none to oppose it.

None? Are you sure about that?

Why don't you just provide some.

Almost all evidence supports negative employment effects of minimum wage increases. A handful of studies do not. It takes a real head-in-the-sand approach to empiricism to claim that there is no evidence to support negative employment effects.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663

A more recent meta study (2013) seems to claim otherwise:

> The weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.

> The report reviews evidence on eleven possible adjustments to minimum-wage increases that may help to explain why the measured employment effects are so consistently small. The strongest evidence suggests that the most important channels of adjustment are: reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; reductions in wages of higher earners ("wage compression"); and small price increases.

http://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf

Call me surprised that a tiny progressive policy think tank would publish something that conveniently ignores all contradicting evidence to find support for the minimum wage.

Here is a methodological criticism of the recent evidence that contradicts the existing 100 years of empirical study: http://econweb.tamu.edu/jmeer/Meer_West_MinimumWage_JHR-fina...

Things change. The current labor market is almost unrecognizably different from even 10 years ago. An explosion in automation has changed the landscape.