Piggybacking the poor while rich get richer

Somewhere in America lives a minimum-wage worker who isn't making enough money working full-time to support her or his family. In the meantime, Indiana's Congressional delegation voted six-to-three to support a $3,100 "cost-of-living" pay increase for all Congressional salaries in 2006. Although the salary of elected Congressional officials has increased $13.70 for 52 weeks of 40 hour employment since the federal minimum wage was last increased to $5.15 in 1997, minimum wage workers haven't earned a penny more since that time for their labor, despite inflated cost-of-living needs. The Senate voted down a federal minimum wage increase in March 49-46, which would have raised the minimum wage by $2.10 to $7.25 throughout the next 26 months. Although many communities across the nation have legislated a "living wage" to help working-class and poor American families scrape by month to month, millions of working men, women and children cannot afford many basic human necessities like healthy food, adequate housing, utility payments and lifelong health care. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 7.3 million working Americans -- including more than 750,000 single mothers -- would have benefited from a few-dollar wage increase. Congressional leaders deserve the more than $3,000 pay increase, which will raise their 2006 annual income to $165,200 a piece before book deals, speaking appearance fees and often free food, transportation and other luxury amenities. All working-class and poor Americans, on the other hand, deserve the opportunity to achieve the so-called American dream of peace, prosperity and happiness. Fifty-two weeks of 40 hours at $5.15 an hour cripples an otherwise working-class or poor American to life conditions below any reasonable federal poverty threshold. Once taxes are taken out, the rent, car and car insurance payments, fuel, utilities and occasional health care needs are paid, most full-time working Americans experience grave difficulty affording food and other cultural necessities like clothes, shoes and school field-trip money for their children. If the more than 500 Congressional representatives pooled their $3,100 pay raise and offered to help compensate the "cost-of-living" needs of the estimated 7.3 million Americans who would have benefited from their legislated financial assistance, each working-class and poor American could receive a quarter dollar of U.S. currency or more each to call someone, albeit anyone, who might care about their circumstances. Poverty is no laughing matter and some believe Congress is guilty of human rights violations for not supporting the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of millions of American men, women and children who have no choice but to miss several meals a week, face continual utility disconnection or threatened eviction and suffer from eternal illness because of no health care despite the fact they are playing their full-time working role in the industrial machine. Since a $.25 federal minimum wage was legislated in 1938, America's congressional leaders have approved $74.61 an hour worth of pay increases for their assumed 52 weeks of 40 hours a week work. American minimum wage workers have earned a $4.90 pay raise during that time -- industrial slave labor free of shackles but necessary for the continuation of an outsourced American economy, some economic experts, business owners and corporation experts say. South of the Mason-Dixon line, for instance, the states of Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee do not abide by any minimum wage law at all within most communities -- Kansas' minimum wage is $2.65 and in Ohio workers receive $4.25 an hour. 27 other states offer working-class and poor Americans the opportunity to work up to the full-time poverty line, and 15 states require their full-time workers receive some kind of a statewide living wage more than the federal minimum. Even if Congress were to donate $.25 of their pay raise to the more than seven million working-class and poor Americans dependent upon their legislated help for survival, twenty-five cents of U.S. currency a piece doesn't afford a call to their local representatives from a Bloomington pay phone. Maybe that's the point.