Don't forget: experiment suggests raising minimum wage does not necessarily raise unemployment.

http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf

This well known paper examines the relationship between the minimum wage and employment, an issue on which economists still have a beautifully symmetrical lack of consensus. Card & Kruegers research design was simple. To quote their abstract: “On April 1, 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. To evaluate the impact of the law we surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and [neighbouring] eastern Pennsylvania before and after the rise. Comparisons of employment growth at stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where the minimum wage was constant) provide simple estimates of the effect of the higher minimum wage”.

The graph (made by me based on the original data) shows the results. Since Pennsylvania did not change its minimum wage, this makes it the control group. If we consider New Jersey and Pennsylvania to be comparable, then we would have expected to see Pennsylvania’s downwarding sloping trend replicated in New Jersey if New Jersey had not increased its minimum wage. But we don’t see this; in fact there is a slight increase in the average number of employees in New Jersey restaurants. The authors interpret this as showing that the rise in the minimum wage did not reduce employment. Further studies on this topic are reviewed here ( http://www.cepr.net/documents/public...ge-2013-02.pdf ) by Schmitt (2013).