filtherton

What you're claiming is true in specific situations, but not across the board. Small businesses are only at a disadvantage if they're already paying minimum wage. In my experience this is rarely the case. What about if a mom and pop is competing against wal-mart:

-the mom and pop pays better than minimum wage
-wal-mart pays minimum wage
-minimum wage goes up
-wal-mart raises wages and makes concurrent adjustments
-the mom and pop doesn't have to do anything

At the vast majority of mom and pop places i've worked, a hike in the minimum wage wouldn't have affected the money they paid their employees at all. They already paid more than the minimum wage. They wouldn't have had to raise their compensation levels at all.

As far as competition with foreign companies, well, assuming a business pays minimum wage(otherwise a minimum wage increase is irrelevant), it only matters if that business is in direct competition with a foreign business, and even then, there are a great deal more factors that come into play than minimum wage.

I'm not sure how many small business actually compete with foreign business. Do you actually have any data on how many small business compete with foreign businesses? I would assume the number as a percentage of the total number of small businesses would be rather small.

I will concede that in certain situations some businesses will be possibly put at some kind of significant disadvantage by an increase in the minimum wage. I really doubt that the number of businesses put in a real bind would be that big and until you offer up some data to counter that assumption you're just blowing smoke.

It could also be argued that a considerable number of business suffer huge disadvantages from the existence of safety regulations, yet i somehow suspect you don't favor their abolishment. Fortunately for us, the rugged american entrepreneur seems to be really good at overcoming adversity, no matter how much of a wet blanket you might make him/her out to be.