These days the minimum wage is so laughably low (in real dollars it's a small fraction of its historical high) that of course it doesn't have an effect on employment. I have no idea how anyone, let alone a single mother or father, could work for minimum wage. Even, say, $10/hr would be a brutal wage to try to raise a kid on. I think in order to really study whether minimum wage affects employment and economic growth, one would have to have a minimum wage that is in the ballpark of a minimum living wage. In that case, we could see what the effects are and have a debate about it. I worked one minimum wage job back in (I believe) 1997, and my only raise was from $4.75 to $5.15 (the minimum wage was increased that summer). The job was at a golf course parking carts, and I was 15 years old. When your biggest concern is buying a dime of skanky weed, you can handle that low of an hourly rate, but I don't know what other segment of society could.
Agreed. I'm thinking maybe this was the wrong site to post this on. I'm a liberal and heavily in favor of policies that would help out the lowest earners, but I like to consider arguments that I think might convince the other side on their own terms, or at least address common objections. So I hope it wasn't too offensive to look at things from the hypothetical perspective that there could be something wrong with increasing minimum wage. I think your points about examining a the effects of raising minimum wage from a higher starting point would make for a good followup study, if one could tease out the effects of skill from differences in earnings in some other bracket.
I'm not sure what would have been offensive, so I don't think you really need to worry about that. There are some resident conservatives on here who probably have a different take, but for the most part, I think most of the regular contributors here are left leaning. Anyway, this is a conservative group, and even they conclude that the minimum wage is negligible in terms of negative effects on the economy.