Another Clarion Call From the House of Shame
By: Jim Freeman
The Senate is, and has been for some years, the only hope for reason on the soap-opera that is Washington politics. By contrast, the House of Representatives is the nitwitery of lawmaking.
Example #4,278 (and counting) came yesterday, as they released their years-long grip on the minimum wage, only after holding a gun to the head of the poor.
A little background. The current minimum wage is $5.15 an hour and hasn’t been adjusted since it was passed in (get this) 1996.
· Five years before 9-11
· Four years before the Supreme Court seated the current ‘compassionate conservative
· Six years before a tsunami of tax cuts for the super-rich of the nation
· Three years before the country’s kids were sent off to battle for the security we require to not raise the minimum wage.
Ancient history. Dishonest, dissembling, self-serving and with the worst possible smell, the odor of ‘counting money in front of the poor.’
Back in 1996, when the minimum wage was last visited, the ‘poverty level’ for a family of four was $15,600. In their nobility of purpose and caring for the less fortunate, that Congress (under pressure in an election year) voted in a minimum wage that provided two thirds poverty. A head-of-household, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, with no time off, earned $10,712 from his Congressional ‘raise.’
Fast-forward to Friday’s legislation. Grudgingly (and again, only under pressure of elections) the House agreed to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, but only to be phased in over the next three years. Ka, ka, ka-ching. Stutter stepping our way to new levels of shame.
The ‘poverty level’ for that same destitute family of four we studied and abandoned in 1996 has now ‘risen’ to $19,350. The House of unRepresentatives is, if nothing else, consistent. Three years from now, they will again achieve a wage that provides two-thirds poverty.
The American poor deserve better. Full poverty is the right of every down-and-out family. Don’t consign our children to partial poverty when the real thing is within reach.
The shamefulness in which the House bathed itself yesterday had to do with the way in which it stiffed the poor. Not satisfied by merely putting off the goal of two thirds poverty for another three years, the House insists on immediate relief of the estate tax. Estates already pass untaxed up to $2 million, but unless that’s raised to $10 million, let the working poor stay at the half-poverty they currently enjoy.
Or is it twice-poverty? Hard to tell. $5.15 gets you $10,712 and poverty is $19,350, so you figure it out. House members haven’t time. They already make 16 times the 40-hour minimum wage and are in Washington so seldom they barely have time to pick up their checks from K-Street. They passed this shameful bill and then took five weeks vacation to soothe their bruised consciences (and bank another $16,000, not including K-Street).
Now they say this maneuver is aimed at heading off the minimum wage as an issue in the mid-term elections. How raising the half-poor to two-thirds poor (and taking three years to do it) defuses 50 million Americans being financially flat on their ass, is beyond me. The tragic fact is that these people have no one to vote for. They have been abandoned by Democrat and Republican alike.
It’s important to know that not everyone in the House is part of this. Take Tom Feeney for example. Tom is from Florida and he is against any raise at all in the wage scale of America’s poorest citizens. “Every principled conservative knows this is horrible stuff,” he is said to have announced.
Tom isn’t poor himself, you realize. But he once knew a poor person. Tom likes money and poor people never gave him any, so it’s easy to see how he came to be a principled conservative. K-Street and the people who like to give Tom money have thus far chipped in to the tune of nearly $4 million for him personally. And they don’t pay him off to mess around with raising the wages of the poor.
The difficulty is to balance needs. There is the need to blather that you are willing to raise the wages of the poor from half-poor to two-thirds poor and the need to bend over for the rich. It’s a shame there isn’t a more equitable way to do that.
No longer a representative house, it’s the House of Shame.