Congress boosts its pay but not minimum wage
Two governing bodies that affect our lives and fortunes considered pay raises for their own members last week.
After a short debate and some jostling with an amendment, the Warren County Commisson rejected a salary hike that might have boosted the annual earnings of each of the 24 members by as much as $500. With only token debate, the U.S. House of Representatives rewarded itself and the Senate with a $3,000 pay raise ? just as it has done almost every year for the past decade.
The semi-automatic Congressional pay raise ? officially termed a cost-of-living adjustment to offset inflation ? came in the same week that the Republican-controlled House voted down a Democratic bill to increase the federal minimum wage, stuck at $5.15 an hour since the last mandated increase in 1997.
Powerful interest groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporations have consistenly fought increases in the legal minimum wage, which now holds some 8 million working Americans in deep poverty. Opponents of increased wages argue that higher labor costs would put millions of low-skilled workers out of a job. But in the dozen or so states that have enacted their own legal minimum wages at varying amounts above $5.15, employment growth exceeds that of the rest of the nation, the Fiscal Policy Institute reports.
The bill rejected by the House GOP majority would have edged wages up in increments over two years, to $7.25 in late 2008.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs, normally a staunch defender of laissez-faire economics, deplored the House’s rejection of the first minimum wage increase since 1997. He suggested that vote was consistent with a Big Business agenda to suppress wages, an agenda which quietly encourages illegal immigration of Mexican laborers, opposes healthcare reform and cuts retirement benefits.
How can our elected representatives behave with such carefree disregard for ? or cynical defiance of ? the most basic needs of our fellow citizens at the lowest end of the economic ladder?
Despite the formality (or the illusion) of periodic elections, Congress has a 97 percent retention rate, a figure that towers above the survival rate of workers in the competitive private sector.
There is no room at the top of America’s decision-making heirarchy for honest, sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, passionate but poor people. As an occupational classification, U.S. Senators and Represenatives are among the wealthiest Americans. Mandatory financial disclosures released earlier this month showed, for example, that the two Tennessee Senators are comfortably situated. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s estimated personal wealth is somewhere between $8.2 and $37 million, while junior Senator and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander reported his assets to be from $12.1 to $43.8 million.
Big Money procures political influence and governmental favors by pouring cash into election campaigns. Some call it a form of patriotic free speech while others regard it as barely-legal graft. For the first six months of 2006, Congress has managed to avoid confronting serious issues like healthcare, American manufacturing jobs, record-high budget deficits, energy supplies and costs, and continuing degradation our shared environment. Instead, we’ve had posturing and pandering, playing to the political extremes while Big Money continues pumping dizzying amounts of cash into the re-election campaigns of incumbents in their employ.
Public financing of election campaigns, though complicated in actual practice, may have to be one of the approaches to making the national decision-making process accessible to average Americans who can argue for the value of the ideas and their own personal virtue and worthiness.
As trustees of a limited public resource, the electromagnetic spectrum, commercial TV and radio broadcasters could be required to offer substantial free airtime to qualified candidates to present themselves and argue their competing policies.
But such a mandate would have to come from Congress, where re-election is the paramount value and where Big Money helps incumbents fend off challengers. Don’t expect our national lawmakers to even the playing field.
Bill Zechman, a Democrat, is a First District representative on the Warren County Commission.