I love your reaction to everything.

Only 3 possible outcomes. Cut hours (which defeats this increase) increase prices (which defeats this increase) or eat costs.... What do you think businesses will do? I can tell you right now both Target and Little Caesars will decrease hours and Little Caesars will most likely increase prices.

In Australia it's $15.59 AUD.

Given the exchange rate that's about $16 USD

I really don't know how to respond to this without being banned, so I'll just laugh and go to sleep.

These three possible outcomes only apply if you ONLY consider the direct impacts. As I've already pointed out, there are heaps of different feedback mechanisms in the market. The net impact is NOT obvious. It isn't even remotely estimable by such crude and amateur reasoning.

"whatever group is more inelastic shall incur the costs. Incentives will drive the decisions. Yada yada economy economy blah blah blah. There is a certain wage people will work for at jobs and maybe Chicago is trying to create a incentive for people to work at McDonalds. People might be saying "I'm not working there for 8.50" and they might change their tone at 10 dollars... but with the state of the economy that dollar amount has lowered and Mcdonalds doesn't need those people who wont work for less because its easy to find people who will. If min wage acts like tax blah blah blah... Most likely business will cut hours or increase prices" - economist

Like those amateur reasonings?

PS - A 4 dollar jump in 5 years is quite a difference. And all the previous wage increases have done is A. decrease hours (I was a store manage at little caesars when they increased it a dollar to 7.25 and Little Caesars immediate response was to limit hours and pay increases). or B. increase prices. Little Caesars sold their pizza at 5 dollars when I left in 2008 (when min wage was 7.25). Now it's been 6.50 for a while and interesting enough minimum wage was 8.50 in 2009.

In fact, Little Caesars tried to pass cost on to the consumer by increase crazy bread and sauce price the very first wage increase I witnessed. It was like 1.50 (1 dollar for bread 50 cents for sauce) for both and they increased it to 2.00(dollar for each). I forgot about that. All that did was make bread sales steady while sauce sales decline... How do I know this? Because we used year old books to calculate stuff that sales figures. We were suppose to use same week as the year before sales and increase it by 10% for our estimated week sales for scheduling and ordering (with taking trends into consideration and changing with managers discretion).

Here's a tip - I never said that professional economists are any better. I can tell you right now that if you ask five different professional economists what impacts such a minimum wage hike will have, you'll get five different answers.

Really dude? Economist have formulas and theories from trends and data...They most likely will give you the same answer using their "laws of...." formulas. Also, look at my edit. All the previous increases have had the effects me and badge have said.

An economist such as you have described is the equivalent of an engineer that uses F = mg to work out the force experienced by the space station, or that uses the formula for air resistance on a sphere to determine the drag on an airplane.

Economics is one of the primary examples of chaos theory. Trends are useless in chaotic systems. The "laws of..." formulas used in economics are all about analysing a single entity or a subset, assuming that all of the rest of the system were going to remain static. This is, of course, an incorrect assumption, but it's useful when trying to analyse what a single company should do when everything remains steady in terms of things like laws. When laws change, the analysis becomes useless.

There's a similar situation in my own field of expertise, which is the mathematical modelling of fluid flow and phase change (another chaotic system, albeit a much smoother one). There are formulas describing equilibrium dynamics - that is, under what circumstances you get everything remaining static. These are useful to find steady states. However, many people apply equilibrium equations to non-equilibrium situations - this is the wrong thing to do, but many do it anyway.

Oh, and for future reference, you need to be careful about your use of "I" and "me". Does this sentence sound sensible? "All the previous increases have had the effects me have said"?

Yes, it does. Because the preposition is there and you understood the point. Sorry, but I don't need to write an essay to you for a grade therefore you don't get the extra effort of correcting my gramar.