> Never. And I'm serious about this.

You know that we have search engines, right?

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20180622.107025/...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=267875

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3381978

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3520915

The article is subheaded "Three decades of research have led to a rethink", and it is all about how economists largely do not oppose minimum wages anymore.

Wait, your contention is that paying poor people more doesn't effect poverty rates, and you are asking other people for citations, not citing something of your own?

You might find this CBO report useful. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55410

Minimum wage doesn't mean "paying poor people more". That's a extreme simplification.

Minimum wage means "All employees you hire must be paid at least $X/hour". Note that if this means that employers decide to fire all employees below that wage (or not hire them), the average amount of money going to poor people would be less than before. Maybe employers fire some, and raises the wage for others, and it's wash. Maybe they do raise the wage for everyone below the minimum, and poor people do end up earning more.

I'm not claiming knowledge of which of these cases will happen. My point is that we shouldn't simplify complex situations to simple descriptions and argue against strawman arguements.

Another way of putting it: if it really was the case that minimum wage means "paying poor people more", why don't we just set minimum wage to $20/hour? $30/hour? $50/hr? Surely that would give even more money to poor people, and poverty rates would be reduced even further! (Because there are tradeoffs involved, and we need to balance them carefully.)

Yes, that is your contention exactly.

The only way you can claim that their argument is that is if you believe that the minimum wage simply means "paying poor people more", and nothing more, which is an absurd simplification, and ignores a lot of nuance (ex. employers don't have to pay the minimum wage, they can simply fire the employee [0]).

If it's really the case that minimum wage means paying poor people more, surely we could just set the minimum wage at $30/hr and pay poor people even more.

I'm not even opposed to the minimum wage myself. I just don't think it's good to simplify a complex situation, and then use that to strawman someone's legitimate point (that it is not a given that minimum wages will reduces poverty rate).

[0] - Another example is that minimum wages vary across jurisdictions, and employers are able to arbitrage that fairly effectively for many jobs.

Minimum-wage employees tend not to be people that can be easily eliminated or offshored. You really haven't thought any of this through, have you?

This article links to a lot of studies about the health benefits of a minimum wage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/mini...