When I was in college back in the dark ages, the band "They Might Be Giants" was the music of choice for the disenfranchised-yet-hip (or so we liked to think of ourselves).
Their song "Minimum Wage" (from the FLOOD album) kept playing in my head this morning as I heard about how Congress decided to give itself a fat raise. The constitution actually forbids this but they work around it by calling it a "cost of living raise."
So it's not higher compensation, it's just to bring in the balance with the rising costs of living. It gets harder and harder to maintain the Connecticut home and the vacation spot on Cape Cod every year - poor souls.
Never mind that minimum wage-slaves are still trapped in a cycle of poverty under an economic theory that dares to suggest (and has been disproved on countless occasions) that raising the minimum wage would bankrupt businesses and actually create more poverty.
Another pop-culture reference: remember Christian Slater's role as the pirate radio jockey on that classic film "Pump Up the Volume" where he says:
"You ever feel like it's just going downhill...that there's no way out...that we are just one beat away from the whole country saying "That's it! I'm done, this is over!"
It's exactly how I feel.