If minimum wage law was such a determining factor why is it countries with a higher minimum wages than the USA have lower (including youth) unemployment rates.
I'll give you my take on this.
What creates employment is consumption and people earning next to nothing don’t consume.
So if you cut the minimum wage all you'll end up doing is reduce the overall consumption, which in turn will drive up unemployment.
The truth might in fact be the reason the USA economy is so stuffed is because the minimum wage has not gone up in decades leading to greatly reduced levels of consumption.
The countries with the highest minimum wages are the democratic socialist states of Europe which all have much higher youth unemployment rates than here. One of the lowest youth unemployment rates in Europe is Germany, which has no minimum wage law.
Whether northern Europe has a minimum wage or not is a bit complex. Neither Germany nor the Nordic countries have statutory minimum wages, but they have very corporatist labor sectors, with strong labor-union participation organized along the lines of broad confederations (giant labor confederations negotiate ground agreements with giant employer confederations). Some of that is entrenched in law, e.g. in most of Scandinavia the workers are guaranteed representatives on certain bodies that can veto things like changes to employment contracts.
So a negotiated minimum wage still covers a large proportion of jobs. In Denmark somewhere around 80% of jobs are covered by the negotiated minimum wage agreements, which are typically set at $20/hr. The main exceptions making up the 20% are small mom-and-pop stores (kebab shops and such) who don't join the employer confederation and therefore aren't subject to the agreements. But all jobs at large companies, like supermarket clerks and janitors, are covered by the minimum wage.
In Denmark this was basically the social-democratic outcome of the late-19th-century labor strife: the moderate wing of the labor movement reached an agreement in September 1899 with moderates within the business community to adopt a consensus-based approach to workplace conditions and pay. That held, so both the laissez-faire capitalist advocates and the militantly socialist portion of the labor movement were sidelined for a century or so.
Actually, I'd argue it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is. Today we see that the minimum wage just means a lot of people aren't working, and if you dropped minimum wage and gave them something to do hourly for pennies they still would have nothing.
If you raised minimum wage, you would just drive McDonalds to automate away more of its menial jobs and make Walmart replace all the cashiers with self checkouts, which I think is good (eliminate the useless wastes of peoples time) but it doesn't mean more people are employed for labor.
The real issue is that the distribution of economic resources has been direly concentrated in very few for 30 years, and they are now the predominant drivers of economic activity because nobody else has any prosperity anymore. It is a compound effect that the people with the money to hire and employ others have nothing to hire or employ them for, and thus they don't, instead they push their money into avenues that make profit off of regulatory exploitation rather than productivity (big banks & the fed, fortune 500 investments, lobbying for monopolies to get artificial markets).
The problem with increasing minimum wage is that the more you increase it, the more incentive you give a company for further ramping up mechanization even though the initial costs are generally high upfront.
I'll give you my take on this.
What creates employment is consumption and people earning next to nothing don’t consume.
So if you cut the minimum wage all you'll end up doing is reduce the overall consumption, which in turn will drive up unemployment.
The truth might in fact be the reason the USA economy is so stuffed is because the minimum wage has not gone up in decades leading to greatly reduced levels of consumption.