Most Americans receive salary increases every year or so, but some workers at the bottom of the pay scale have been stuck at the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage, which hasn’t been raised for nine years. We applauded recently when Congress decided to take up the issue for the first time in a decade.
But late Friday, House Republicans linked an increase in the minimum wage to a tax cut for multi-millionaires. It was political gamesmanship of the most cynical sort.
It’s now up to the Senate to devise with a wage bill that stands on its own two feet.
The current minimum hourly wage is well below the nation’s poverty level. A full-time worker making minimum wage earns $10,700 a year – barely enough to feed oneself in this economy, and $5,000 below the poverty level for a family of three. Nearly 36 million people in the United States live in poverty. The bill approved by the House and sent to the Senate would raise the minimum to $7.25 an hour in 70-cent increments over three years, starting next January.
GOP leaders see the minimum wage bill as a vehicle to get permanent cuts in the estate tax, a levy paid only on estates of more than $2 million. Republicans are trying to trump an effort by Democrats, who see the minimum wage as a fall elections issue.
Senate Democrats have threatened to kill the House hybrid bill, putting themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to vote against the first minimum wage increase in a decade.
Contrary to what opponents of an increase believe, many minimum wage jobs are not entry-level positions for high school kids. A study last year from the Center for Economic Policy Research found that a third of minimum-wage workers between the ages of 25 and 54 still earn it three years later. In contrast, the national average wage rose 38 percent from 1996 to 2004, from $25,914 to $35,649, according to the Social Security Administration. And an average chief executive was paid 821 times as much as a minimum-wage earner in 2005 ($4,228.15 an hour), the Economic Policy Institute reports.
Congress voted to raise the minimum wage in 1996, increasing it from $4.25 to $4.75 and then to its current level in 1997. Since 1997, members of Congress have raised their own pay by $31,600, to $165,200 a year.
Consider too that $5.15 in purchasing power in 1997 is worth $4.12 today – a 20 percent drop.
The increase is overdue, and the nation’s 7 million minimum wageholders shouldn’t be hostage to the GOP’s anti-tax agenda.
