| > ultimately your argumentation also goes to show how important workplace safety regulations are I'm not sure if you realize that across multiple industries the rate at which worker fatality stats improved either stayed the same or even declined when OSHA was introduced. In short, it's not clear at all that federal worker safety regs actually improve worker safety. You can perhaps see that best in the graph (Figure 34.1) on the third page of this PDF: http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/ca... Regarding the study, I'm not saying you can't learn anything from studies. I am saying that when we have hundreds of studies showing that the minimum wage generally causes unemployment - and we do - one or two that say "but it's hard to see the effect of this one small change in this one small area with this one specific way of looking at the data" aren't enough to rebut that general presumption. If you want to "even start answering", you should read at least ONE study on the other side, not just look at data sources that agree with you. For instance, you could read this: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~pjkuhn/Ec250A/Readings/Neumark_eta... The unemployment stats I pointed to were comparing having a minimum wage AT ALL to not having one - bigger changes are more likely to be highly visible in the output data. BTW, to answer your question (somewhere else in this thread) about Germany, the last time it had very high unemployment was around 2005 when it had a high minimum wage and lots of "worker protection" laws. After the German labor market was freed up a bit (including getting rid of that minimum) the unemployment rate there dropped quite dramatically. Here's a chart of what that looked like: http://mediaserver.fxstreet.com/Reports/95e05c46-b989-46ee-a... (UPDATE: Wait, that's showing values in millions of workers, not as percentages, which is a little misleading. So here's a chart that shows the rate while comparing Germany to France over the same period: http://thinkingoftheworld.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/chart-...
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as for the study, for the third time now i will repeat - i agree that minimum wage may raise unemployment. as far as i have noticed here, so does this study that Seattle commissioned before introducing the minimum wage. the question is, what is the relationship between the gains and losses?