Hi, all. This is my first diary. I was going to post one about the 10 Commandments issue, but I felt this was more timely.
It seems a little bit odd to me that the shooting down of the minimum wage proposals has gotten so little attention on the blogs. That's not to say that it hasn't been mentioned at all: Hunter and Armando have both posted on the subject, though both focused primarily on Santorum's sham proposal. Little has been mentioned about the Kennedy proposal, nor the wisdom of raising the federal minimum wage in general, apart from several very informative posts over at Think Progress. I wanted to try to get as much of this information together in one place as possible and generate a discussion.
I should start by mentioning that Kennedy's proposal, tied as it was to a bill doomed to failure (and rightly so), didn't stand a chance. I should also mention that to his credit, Sen. Kennedy has tried numerous times to get a change in the minimum wage passed since the last increase in 1996-97. If his main goal was, as some Democrats have said, to "to use the issue to increase chances for passage of state minimum wage initiatives in 2006," it won't work unless there is a public discussion about its necessity that will keep the issue in the public eye.
This is above all a values issue. Much has been said about how the Democrats need to frame every negative move by the Republican majority as an example of their misplaced values. And yet the only talk I've heard along these lines comes from Sen. Tom Harken, D-Iowa: "This is a values issue. This is at the heart of what kind of country we want." This is a perfect opportunity to throw the "values card" back at them. Or, to take another tack, there were four Republicans who voted for Kennedy's proposal. Does this not make the minimum wage increase a bipartisan effort? The Left is terrified of having even a single Democrat move to compromise on the Social Security issue because even that one cross-over would give the Right the excuse to say it has "bipartisan" support on SS reform. Why are we then not trumpeting the bipartisan support in this case, with four Republicans approving the measure?
And by the way, lets have a nice round of applause for Senators Chafee (R-RI), Coleman (R-MN), DeWine (R-OH) and Domenici (R-NM) for voting for the Kennedy amendment. And also a huge rasberry to Senators Baucus (D-MT) and Conrad (D-ND) for voting down the Santorum amendment but not (for some reason) being able to get to the chamber a half hour earlier to support Kennedy's.
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There are a lot of misconceptions about raising the minimum wage, all of which are repeated by the Republican majority with little proof to support them. The Heritage Foundation released its own report that again makes the same claims, again with inaccurate proofs if any. Since Think Progress deserves the credit for doing the leg work to discredit these claims, I'll let them speak for me. Go. Read.
The gist of it is this: raising the minimum wage will not increase unemployment, will not cause economic stagnation, will raise the standard of living for 7.4 million working Americans, will improve performance in the low-wage labor markets, and will put more money back into local economies. Go read the link, it's worth it.
There have been several attempts to raise the minimum wage since 1996, but all have failed. In that same time, Congress voted to allow itself a pay raise 7 times in 8 years, totalling $28,500, while refusing to at times even discuss raising the minimum wage. So for a sense of scale, let's take a moment to compare the relative "wages" of our Congressmen versus those who bag their groceries.
108th Congress (2004):
Senate Leadership
Majority Leader - $ 175,600
Minority Leader - $ 175,600
Rank and File - $ 158,100
House Leadership
House Speaker - $ 203,000
Majority Leader - $ 175,600
Minority Leader - $ 175,600
Rank and File - $ 158,100
Now if these fine public servants were wage earners making this much, the wages would break down like this (assuming a 40 hour work week and 2 weeks paid vacation):
Majority Leader - $ 87.80/hr
Minority Leader - $ 87.80/hr
Senate Rank/File - $ 79.05/hr
House Speaker - $101.50/hr
Again, the Federal Minimum Wage is currently $5.15/hr.
Here are some more facts about the Federal Minimum Wage:
- The FMW is typically half that of the average Private sector wage ($15.90). Currently the minimum wage is at 32% of the private sector average, practically an all-time low.
- The FMW's real dollar value, adjusted for inflation, was at $4.82 in 2004.
- Over 80% of Americans support raising the FMW, while only 6% oppose it, according to a survey done by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, only 43% of Congress considers a wage increase a "top priority."
- From Think Progress: "A 1999 report by the Economic Policy Institute revealed that the main beneficiaries from a minimum wage increase would be women since this group makes up a disproportionate majority of low-wage workers. As such, 'a minimum wage increase would help to reduce the overall pay gap between women and men.' Furthermore, 'forty percent of minimum wage workers are the sole breadwinners in their families' and women are overrepresented in this group as well."
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Can a person live on $10,700 a year? They can. I know, because I've done it--I've lived on even less. But then, at the time I was about 19 years old with two roommates and no appreciable bad habits to support. So I got by. (Though my doctor -- assuming I could have afforded one -- would have surely chastised me for the prodigious amount of Ramen and generic mac 'n' cheese that made up my diet back then.)
What about a married couple with no children? Well, imagine you make that $5.15, working a 40 hour slave wage job in a midsized, midwestern city. That's about $900 a month. You pay rent for your one bedroom apartment -- there goes $350 (if you're lucky, and can live with the roaches). If you don't eat out ever, you're probably going to spend about $300 a month on groceries. Let's say your utilities (phone, electric, gas) run about $150 on average (a low estimate to be sure, now that the energy rates have gone up). You take the bus to work, and they just increased the fares to make up for the state deficit, so you're spending about $60 a month. There's the nuts and bolts: food, shelter, utilities, transportation. Now you want to do something fun. You rent a video once a week (cheaper than the movie theater) and return them all on time. There's another $20. So where do we stand right now?
350 + 300 + 150 + 60 + 20 = $880! You've got a nice crisp twenty dollar bill left over! But oh, wait. You're anniversary is coming up next week, and you want to do something nice for her. Maybe you could take her out to an actual movie theater, she really wanted to see Constantine on the big screen. But then you still couldn't afford popcorn. Hmm. You could buy her a nice new dress...well, okay, not for twenty clams, but maybe a...scarf? Or a t-shirt. You could just give her a long, steamy, sensuous kiss, hoping she'd find it romantic, but then you remember that you haven't been to the dentist in 14 years....
Before anyone thinks to themselves that this example is not very emblematic of today's married couples, remember that according to the EPI's report, nearly 3,000,000 people working for the minimum wage are the sole breadwinners in their families. And in my example, there are no kids. Neither does it include most typical kinds of discretionary spending, medical checkups, vacations trips, any kind of long term savings or Christmas.
Oh, and by the way -- about that $900 a month? That's before taxes. You're actually taking home about $815. So much for your anniversary, not to mention paying your phone bill on time.