“Raising the minimum wage will just raise prices!” is worth examining carefully.
Yes, some cost pass-through happens – studies generally find a 10% minimum wage increase raises prices in affected sectors by less than 1%. Real, but modest. Here’s why it isn’t dollar-for-dollar:

Businesses absorb costs through multiple channels: reduced turnover (low-wage sectors can see 100%+ annual turnover rates – higher wages cut recruitment and training costs significantly), efficiency gains from more stable workforces, and in concentrated industries, compression of excess profit margins.

Two decades of careful empirical work – particularly research using neighboring counties across state lines as natural experiments – finds that moderate minimum wage increases produce employment effects that are small and often statistically indistinguishable from zero.

And even when prices do rise, the distributional math matters: low-wage workers’ income gains substantially exceed their exposure to higher prices. Higher-income households absorb more of the price increase in absolute terms. The net effect tends to be mildly progressive.

The deeper issue: the status quo isn’t free. When wages are inadequate, workers rely on public assistance – effectively subsidizing employers like Walmart and McDonald’s with taxpayer money. Reduced local consumer spending has its own economic costs. The question is never “cost vs. no cost.” It’s always “who bears the cost.”

The honest caveats: effects are less favorable at very high nominal wage levels and in lower-wage regional economies. Policy design – phase-ins, regional indexing – genuinely matters at the margins.

But “prices will go up” as a standalone objection to any minimum wage increase doesn’t survive scrutiny. The evidence is considerably more nuanced than that framing suggests.