level of skilled labor which is encompassed by the words "minimum wage." Or the number of people in jobs, and the skills required to hold them, at $.50 and $1.00 and $2.00 above minimum wage, all of which would be impacted upward by an increase in the minimum wage, maybe even to a point above SNAP and Medicaid eligibility for the employee's families.

I also think they are not filled in the proportion you think they are by part-timers and students, vs. heads of household, single parents, etc.

I also think you ignore empirical surveys on things like the raising of local minimum wages over the federal $7.25/ hr to levels like $9, $11, $13, etc by major municipalities and even states. New York and California are phasing in $15/hr minimum wages; Seattle is too. (most of these phase-ins will take 3-5 years btw) None of these places failed to study the issue carefully before taking that step.

And even companies: Target's company-wide minimum wage is now $10/hr, $2.75 an hour above the Federal minimum. Why would Target do this? I'd suggest the Henry Ford paradigm.

Henry Ford understood that it was good for Ford for its employees to be able to afford to buy a Ford, and so he paid them enough so that they could, at a rate much higher than other employers were paying in the Dearborn area at the time.

Words like "disastrous to the people it is intended to help" require IMO more than just a naked assertion. I've presented my hypothesis: demand for the lowest tier of labor is inelastic or sufficiently so, after decades of effort at technological and automation improvements designed to eliminate human labor wherever possible, that the increase won't significantly decrease job availability, which has shrunk to bare-bones level. I find this scenario equally as likely as yours.