With income inequality looming as an election issue, thousands of protesters took to the streets across the United States earlier in the day to demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers.
"Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases," said Republican Ben Carson, 64, a retired neurosurgeon who has pulled slightly ahead of the pack in some opinion polls. "I'm interested in making sure that people can enter the job market."
All of the Democratic presidential candidates including front-runner Hillary Clinton, 68, have called for an increase in the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25.
But Republican real estate magnate Donald Trump, 69, said a rise in the minimum wage would put businesses in the United States at a disadvantage with foreign competitors.
"We are a country that is being beaten on every economic front," Trump said. "We cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world."
Tuesday's debate comes at a critical time in the race for the Republican nomination in the November 2016 election, with Carson and Trump fighting to hold their spot atop the polls and Florida Senator Marco Rubio trying to build on the momentum of his last strong debate performance.
Carson has faced a rough week of scrutiny about whether he embellished key aspects of his biography, while Rubio, 44, is under pressure to show he can fight off recent criticism of his inexperience as he tries to unseat fellow Floridian Jeb Bush as a favorite of the party's mainstream.
Rubio also said he would oppose an increase in the minimum wage.
"If you raise the minimum wage, you are going to make people more expensive than machines," said Rubio, who has not led opinion polls in any early voting state, and lags Bush, a 62-year-old former governor, and others in fund-raising.
In an earlier debate on Tuesday involving four lower-polling Republican candidates, several accused the Federal Reserve of keeping U.S. interest rates low for political reasons and one called for replacing Fed chair Janet Yellen.
"The Fed should be audited and the Fed should stop playing politics with our money supply," New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal tried to distinguish himself by repeatedly attacking Christie and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for failing to cut government spending during their tenures as governors.
Christie declined to take the bait, turning the debate back again and again to the need for Republicans to rally around a nominee who can defeat Clinton.
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