> This equation has two sides, remember? Minimum wages will benefit the poorest people the most by increasing their income, all while increasing prices generally - which everyone pays for. Among the poorest you will see an increase in purchasing power, while everyone else's will be slightly reduced.

The problem is most of the poor don't actually get that bump. None of the people who lose their jobs do, nor anyone who was already unemployed, nor the people whose wages were already just above the new minimum wage. But they all have to pay the higher prices.

> Also, at least in Germany, there has been no statistically significant change to general employment when the minimum wage was introduced.

This is quite unsurprising. The vast majority of people make more than minimum wage so instituting a minimum wage would have little to no effect on their employment. The loss of employment is to the people who had been making less than the new minimum wage.

People are often surprised how few people actually make minimum wage. It's a low single digit percentage of people.

> There have however been some marginal price increases as well as reduced employment (< -2% according to some sources) in those sectors affected, which are offset by roughly 5% higher wages in those sectors, as well as increased employment in other sectors. Total employment even increased. That works out to a net positive in my book.

This is purporting to show the effects of a minimum wage that only existed for little more than a year when the studies were done. It takes longer than that for some companies to realign their operations with the new costs, e.g. to replace your checkout clerks with machines you have to negotiate with suppliers, evaluate the machines, deploy them, etc. In the meantime you keep the employees and eat the higher cost, but only temporarily.

This is why evaluating this kind of thing is extremely difficult. It can take a decade or more to fully shake out, but the number of confounders that can appear in that time frame make it difficult to distinguish the effects of the minimum wage from everything else that happens in the economy. That's why the issue remains contentious.

More annoyingly, studies in different economies are not comparable. To see why, imagine the effects of a $5000/hour minimum wage. Obviously an unemployment disaster. Meanwhile a $0.05/hour minimum wage would cause approximately no unemployment, but also yield no other benefits.

The amount of unemployment caused by a given minimum wage is determined by dynamic characteristics of the economy. The same minimum wage will cause different amounts of unemployment in Pennsylvania than California etc., or different amounts in 2005 than 2015.

It's all too easy to screw it up and end up on the wrong side of the equation. And even when it's "working" you're still severely screwing over a small percentage of the working poor in exchange for a very modest wage increase for the remainder.