Bloodless Coup

The Republican Congress: Happy to Increase Their Own Salaries, But Not Those of the Working Poor

There were 52 votes in the Senate in favor of raising the minimum wage, but the Republican leadership still blocked it. For the record the wage hasn't been raised in 9 years. Tell you what, if they are going to refuse to raise the minimum wage - how about we revoke their own cost-of-living raises for that 9 year period too - including interest of course. Seems only fair - and actually not nearly fair enough given that mmany members of Congress are exceedingly wealthy and even those few that aren't still don't have to live in the same desperate manner as those who have to rely on the minimum wage.

One thing that gets me in all this is that the GOP constantly brings out the same old tired canards about how it hurts business - but there's a lot of research to suggest that it doesn't, and it certainly doesn't hurt the economy generally (these people are so poor that they have to spend everything they make right back into the economy). And all that is to say nothing of the moral issue at hand.

But isn't it a moral issue when more than 36 million Americans live in poverty and more than 40 million people in the wealthiest county in the world lack health insurance? Many major religious denominations support raising the minimum wage. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops says that Catholic social teaching regards work as a reflection of our human dignity, and that receiving poverty wages is an affront to individual self-respect.

And isn't it immoral that Congress--which has given itself a cost-of-living pay raise for the past five years in a row--has allowed the federal minimum wage to lose its purchasing power, so that minimum-wage workers today are worse off now than they have been in decades? At its peak in 1968, the minimum wage was worth the equivalent of almost $7 an hour today. That was also the last year that the minimum wage was above the nation's poverty line. The effect of the last increase in the federal minimum wage, to $5.15 in 1997, has been completely eroded by inflation. That figure (which equals $10,700 a year) is now less than one-third of the average hourly wage of American workers, the lowest level since 1949. If the federal minimum wage were increased to just $7 an hour, at least 7.4 million workers would receive a wage boost. If the minimum wage were pegged at $9.50, millions more would be lifted out of poverty. The largest group of beneficiaries would be children, whose parents would have more money for rent, food, clothing and other basic necessities.

Business leaders still trot out economists to claim that raising the minimum wage will destroy jobs and hurt small businesses. But the evidence, based on studies of the effects of past increases in both the federal and state minimum-wage levels (twelve states have minimum wages higher than the federal level), shows otherwise. Because the working poor spend everything they earn, every penny of a minimum-wage increase goes back into the economy, increasing consumer demand and adding at least as many jobs as are lost. Most employers actually gain, absorbing the increase through decreased absenteeism, lower recruiting and training costs, higher productivity and increased worker morale.

And of course it is also worth noting (if you believe in a progressive society or meritocracy with rewards going to those who work hard) that in this country the gaps between rich and poor are much greater in this country than in similarly "rich" Europe, and social mobility is considerably less here than it is there.

All in all there are a multitude of reasons to raise this (for the first time in 9 years), and the Senate Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for making it that much harder for the working poor to scrape by - while they happily pocket more of the tax dollars of hard-working Americans to increase their own 6-figure salaries.