Congress Raises Its Salary, But Not Our Wages

You know what's really fucking stupid? Especially in an election year in which your party--the one that has maintained a stranglehold on Congress for over a decade--stands to lose big in the face of lobbying scandals and indictments, scandals over warrantless wiretapping and unchecked abuses of executive power, the torture of prisoners and the massacres of civilians, and revelations of lies without end by the Bush regime about Iraq?

I'll tell you what's really fucking stupid. The U.S. House of Representatives voting to raise members' own salaries while the Senate denies an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Forget the utter bullshit naysayers of increasing the minimum wage try to pawn off on you. Contrary to the lies you've probably been told, raising wages for the poor and middle class will not result in layoffs and higher prices.

Think about the fallacy of what these naysayers are telling you for a moment; why, in what is allegedly a consumer economy, would you not want 95% of the population to be able to circulate more money back into the economy? The bottom and middle rungs of the income ladder are the ones that spend the money that circulates throughout the economy. We buy the products, which allows businesses to earn profit and keep prices down. If people living at or below the poverty line, or in the middle income level, have more money to spend why on Earth would anyone seriously expect us not to spend it on the things we need to get by?

According to CNN's Lou Dobbs:

Raising the minimum wage to $7.50 would positively affect the lives of more than 8 million workers, including an estimated 760,000 single mothers and 1.8 million parents with children under 18. But even this 46 percent increase would get them only to the poverty line. Don't you think these families just might need that cost-of-living increase a bit more than our elected officials who are paid nearly $170,000 a year?

With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955, according to the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Also, since the last time Congress increased the minimum wage for our lowest-paid workers, buying power has fallen by 25 percent. Yet over that time our elected representatives have given themselves eight pay raises totaling more than 23 percent.

Does that or does that not make sense?

In an election year in which the GOP's moral and ethical bankruptcy have never been clearer, in which the number of dead American soldiers in Bush's misadventure in Iraq has passed the 2,500 mark, and in which Bush's constant abuses of power become frighteningly more blatant every day, showing the party's utter contempt for the average American by denying us a wage increase while at the same time raising its own salaries is nothing short of complete and total arrogance.

This is why it is so vitally important for you to get your asses to the polls this November and vote Democrat, Green, Progressive, whatever it is as long as it's not Republican. When one-party rules goes uninterrupted for any length of time, corruption seeps in and becomes the norm. The people get left out of the equation, unless we rise up and demonstrate with our vote and our scrutiny that such crimes will not go unpunished.