It is not that complicated to understand why
all minimum wage jobs won't be offshored with a minimum wage hike. Just think about it: all the businesses that did so would vanish, along with the economy. In other words, outsourcing all jobs that are paid minimum wage would guarantee the destruction of their own company. After all, they can import goods until the cows come home, but they are mostly selling them (especially the goods made in China) to the general public. Eliminate their income source and where's your profit then? So even on a first glance the risk that all jobs go overseas if the minimum wage increases is zero. The argument that the amount of jobs available
would decrease is the more plausible fear, I think, but as I mentioned above I think this also tends to be a minimal concern when businesses have already minimized to the maximal degree how many people they hire. At a certain point the employment level of a company becomes inelastic; go lower and you simply can't operate. And I'm guessing most businesses are already there, as has been the trend for years.
Regarding the slim margin small businesses may find at risk with a payroll increase, I would question why they are not seeing a commensurate increase in sales that goes along with the general public having more disposable income as a result of their higher pay scale. Could it be that all the new income going to minimum wage workers is going to Amazon instead of to them? But in that case they were doomed anyhow, and this is just hastening that situation. I don't like it, but in that scenario in particular I have to unusually side with TheDrake in saying that this is the general tide at work, not the new law that is responsible.
But if that is indeed the case, wouldn't that apply equally to all economic pronouncements? Like "minimum wage will destroy the economy" or "lower taxes are always good"?
To whatever extent an economist is sure of something is the extent to which I doubt the claim. I think there are obviously some things we can rely on. For instance trial and error seems to show pretty clearly that altering the prime rate has a somewhat predictable effect on bank lending and consumer borrowing. This is not some arcane theory, but a mechanically demonstrated phenomenon. Now if an economist was going to insist that lowering the prime rate
would definitely fix a problem, now we are getting into astrology, because that would imply they know for certain what is causing a trough, which surely they could not know with authority. But on the other hand in the case of a trough, I think an economist suggesting to at least try lowering the prime rate would certainly be making a reasonable suggestion with some chance of success.
I hope I understood your question? Generally I think general pronouncements are going to be problematic, because the fact is that the aggregate effects in the economy are really just that: a series of discrete events all happening at once. Generalizing a massive and complex system into "X happens because of Y" is about as silly as saying that a person is feeling unwell because he must have a bug; or worse, because his humors are out of balance. Needless to say, we know that all sorts of minutiae in both body and mind can cause 'distemper'. You could feel vaguely unwell, due to a conglomeration of actually unrelated circumstances, including anxiety about something you've consciously forgotten about, that time you pulled a muscle and since then slightly favor one thigh (thereby causing an imbalance in your lower back and now causing a pinching in your neck), the fact that you wronged someone back when you were 8 years old, and the fact that you haven't exercised enough recently and when you did your brow was tense. And just toss in that your diet has thrown your gut microbiome out of whack, and you have a malady soup that no doctor, osteopath, or psychiatrist is equipped to untangle for you with a general statement about wellness. And now imagine that the economy is made up of millions of people
like this, and that the functioning of the economy is as much a function of their state of mind as it is of fluid dynamics, flow theory, etc etc etc. So that is in a nutshell what I think about pithy pronouncements about economics.
Again, it's not that we cannot say anything, but economists usually say too much. I really enjoy economics, so this is not some diatribe against the study of it.
Take a small analogy in political science: it's oft taken for granted that democracy is the best option for governance in our day and age. But in order to ascertain what effect a particular democratic system will have, it's not enough to draw a schema on paper and say it should be like this and that it ought to work pretty good. It will also involve
who will be participating in it; what these people are like; what happened in their history; what current establishments are in place and how they will function in it; what a person
could do in that system, aside from what they are
supposed to do; and many other factors. Some general statement about its function would really be meaningless without these details.