This is a diffuse impact, rather than localised — if waiters are required to be paid more, some factory workers may lose their jobs.
I’d guess one problem with those assumptions is that you may be right about the impact diffusing. Most workers in Seattle are above the minimum wage, so the total increase in costs of a regional minimum wage increase to a factory that doesn’t employ many or any minimum wage employees is going to be marginal, if even detectable.
And if we want to take more things into account and be holistic, we also have to examine the increasing in spending power of the minimum wage workers too.
> If labor is costly, the country isn’t as competitive compared to others, so jobs are outsourced.
The US minimum wage has been declining in spending power, and is relatively low compared to many other developed countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
In the long term, all of our outsourcing is temporary anyway. The economies of the places we’re outsourcing to, like China and India, experience more growth and prices increase the more we outsource. The discrepancy between costs there and costs here is shrinking, and eventually when labor costs catch up, the overseas transportation costs, extra management and quality control costs, turnaround times, time zone offsets and communication and language difficulties, will make outsourcing more expensive than local sourcing. It might take some time, but ultimately outsourcing won’t be much of an economic threat.