From Gabriel Gifford's Cactus Roots Connection, Vol. 22 we learn that the Democrats still haven't learned that government minumum wage laws have negative effects:

Raising the Minimum Wage
Giffords also backed legislation boosting the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, the latest in a series of sweeping measures enacted by the 110th Congress. Giffords is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan minimum wage bill, the first pay raise for working Americans in a decade. Now $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage will go up $2.10 over two years and directly benefit an estimated 13 million workers and their families.

In Arizona, an estimated 148,000 workers will benefit from the hourly wage hike. Nearly 70 percent of those workers are at least 20 years old and almost 60 percent are women. "This pay raise is long overdue," said Giffords, the former president and chief executive officer of Tucson's El Campo Tire Inc. "Over the past ten years the minimum wage was stuck at $5.15 an hour, while members of Congress benefited from nearly $32,000 in pay increases. That is unacceptable."

And how many wokers won't benefit from this hike and will be fired or never hired in the first place? Shoot folks, if the minimum wage is so good why not immediately raise it to $9.00 a hour? The reason is that the negative effects would be too evident and the voting public would learn that Democrats can't be trusted (the Republicans can't either but that's an item for another day).

For some background:

According to a claim by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the passage of the first Federal mandated minimum wage in the United States in 1933 led to an estimated 500,000 blacks losing their jobs via replacement by higher skilled and more educated white laborers. Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, called the minimum wage one of the most "anti-negro laws" for what he saw as its adverse affects on employers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#_note-mack