The local paper had this column on Minnesota's new minimum wage law which raises the minimum wage bto $6.15. The silliest passage is the following:
The people who make this lower wage generally put the money back into the economy, so paying them more should be at least a small help.
So, if that extra dollar per hour does not go to a minimum wage employee, where does it go and does it leave the economy? Sure, if the employer takes that dollar, rips it up, and throws it away, it most surely leaves the economy. Instead, that dollar probably would have made it into the economy anyway because businesses use other resources besides minimum wage workers to serve their customers. Besides, who's to say that the minimum wage employee is going to spend the extra dollar locally?
Here is a piece providing some anecdotal evidence on how employers respond to minimum wage increases. Here's a piece by Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek on the argument that big companies should pay their lowest-paid employees more because they can.