Raising the minimum wage helps low-income workers

A higher minimum wage is a transfer — from employers and customers to workers who keep their jobs, and from workers who lose their jobs (or never get hired) to those still employed. Whether the net effect helps low-income workers depends entirely on the size of those two flows, and the second one is invisible in the data: a job that doesn't get created leaves no statistical footprint.

The modern empirical literature on minimum-wage effects is genuinely divided, but the cleanest natural experiments — sharp cross-state increases, fast-food employment, automated kiosks replacing cashiers — consistently find disemployment effects for the least-skilled workers, especially teenagers, recent immigrants, and people without high school degrees. These are precisely the workers the policy is supposed to help.

The more honest framing: a minimum-wage increase benefits the median low-wage worker at the expense of the marginal one. Whether that's a trade you want depends on which worker you're optimising for, and that's a values question — not an empirical one.