Does raising the minimum wage actually do anything?

What minum wage DOES cause the elimination of or reduced hiring for low-skilled jobs. If I'm an emplioyer with a budget for 10 sweepers/moppers, for example, that I'm willing to pay $5 an hour, each, rasing the minumum wage to $10 an hour doesn't change my budget any! No... My employment budget would remain the same in the short term (e.g. this year), and now, with the increase in minimum wage, I can now only afford to hire FIVE sweepers/moppers, because I have to pay them double. Or, if I do hire all 10 of them, I have to double their duties, say, by making them also empty ashtrays and clean out refrigerators.

In other words, just because a law increses the price per man-hour of labor doesn't mean people will get raise overnight for doing the same amount of work!

So, raising the minimum wage only serves to place an artifcial price floor on a commodity (labor), thereby potentially causing an unecessary surplus of labor (the "unhireable"), or creating the need for increasing the requirement on productivity (making workers have to work harder within the same amount of work hours, for their "raise").

Raising the minimum wage can also potentially lead to layoffs, due, again, to limited employer budgets; or can potentially lead to a rise in prices for goods or services offered by a business or industry (i.e. the money to pay higher wages has to come from somewhere, and this is a potential cause of inflation).

It would increase prices except for the fact that we import everything from China. It has been argued that an increase in the minimum wage would result in higher unemployment rates for low paid workers, however, an increase in the minimum wage would increase purchasing power which could offset that somewhat.