You're right in pointing out that there might be unnacounted variables which might confound the impact of the minimum wage hike. But the majority of people runn

You're right in pointing out that there might be unnacounted variables which might confound the impact of the minimum wage hike. But the majority of people running around saying that higher minimum wages cause unemployment do so on the basis of an overly simplified model (the standard partial equilibrium from Econ 101, where they're looking only at supply and demand curves for labor under complete information). Once you start weaking some conditions (using a search and matching framework instead of contracting under complete information) and adding confounding variables (like economy wide-effects or consumer credit restritions), not only your conclusions might change, but you might actually get a better model. Academics have some grasp of this and are much more subdued in their conclusions, specially when coming from pure theory. Pundits, however, are paid to be clueless. And I think this is the true insight of this submission.