Hank Kalet

A dozen years of Republican Congressional rule and all we have is a deteriorating middle class — but I guess that wasn’t too much of a price to pay for the return of “values” to the public sphere.

The key to understanding the damage wrought by the GOP’s not-so-benign neglect is the federal minimum wage. As Derrick Z. Jackson writes today in a column in The Boston Globe, the “minimum wage has become one of the most appalling symbols of the exploding gap between rich and working poor in this nation.”

Workers earning the federal minimum of $5.15 an hour gross just $026 a week and $10,712 a year — not enough to cover housing around these parts, let alone food, clothing, transportation, child care, health care, or anything else. Here is what I wrote about the issue in 2005, after the show “30 Days” aired a segment on living on the minimum wage. (The show’s creator, Morgan Spurlock, and his fiance, Alexandra Jamieson, spent a month working minimum wage jobs and trying to survive in Columbus, Ohio.)

Several scenes stand out: There was the embarrassment of having to put groceries back because the food budget just won’t allow for the purchase of an extra bottle of water. And there was the difficulty in finding an apartment while clearing a little more than $350 a week between them. The best they could do was an apartment in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Columbus — a situation in which far too many at the bottom of the income ladder find themselves.

New Jersey attempted to rectify this problem with a phased-in hike to $7.15 that will fully kick in in 2007. And the new Democratic majority is promising a federal hike — phased in over two years — to $7.25.

It is a start — the least we could do, really — but not nearly enough to address growing inequalities we have come to view as all too normal.

Consider: A wage hike to $7.25 will boost weekly income to just $290, or about $1,200 a month — not much when you consider that housing in Middlesex County (according to a 2005 report) costs between $1,100 and $1,500 month.

The argument against raising the minimum — that it would destroy small businesses — has always had a hollow ring, as a new study shows. From Derrick Jackson’s column:

A new briefing paper released this week by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, studied the 17 states and the District of Columbia that had raised the minimum wage between 1997 and 2005. It found that the states that increased the minimum wage actually experienced — for the most part — higher wages “without reducing employment or discouraging labor supply.” The median minimum wage of those states is $1.40 over the federal wage.

“Overall,” the report said, “it is safe to conclude that statistically reliable evidence for any employment losses in the data is nonexistent.” This included restaurants and bars, where owners and lobbyists have long cried they would be devastated if they were forced to pay higher wages. The report quoted a study of New Jersey’s fast-food industry that concluded, “The increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage probably had no effect on total employment . . . and possibly had a small positive effect.”

A study earlier this year by the Fiscal Policy Institute of New York found better economic performance in the 10 states with higher minimum wages than the others.

So the Democrats deserve some credit for promising a wage hike, but the reality is that it is — as Jackson says — a day late and more than a dollar short:

The current value of the minimum wage is the lowest since the $4.74 of 1955, when adjusted for inflation. The proposed raise to $7.25 still does not equal the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage in 1968, $7.71. The minimum wage is currently only 31 percent of the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers. That equals the widest gap since 1949. For the 1950s and ’60s, the wage floated between 44 percent and 56 percent of the average hourly wage.

According to other liberal think tanks, such as the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the minimum wage would now be $23 if it had risen at the same pace as CEO pay since 1990.

Another thing to consider is this (also noted by Jackson): It would take a wage of $8 an hour just to get a worker to the federal poverty line for a single-parent family of three — and this does not take into account that many who study the issue believe that the poverty line is actually a lot higher than the figure set by the government.

Increasing the minimum to $7.25 is perhaps the least we could do. But it is more than has been done in years.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The plot thickens on the House Intelligence Committee as Alcee Hastings pulls out of the running. It appears, as well, that Jane Harman maybe out, leaving the door open for a new face.

According to various wire service reports (including this one), soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “is still considering other candidates for the post, including Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, Norman Dicks of Washington, Rush Holt of New Jersey and Sanford Bishop of Georgia, according to the Democratic aide.”

Hmmm. Stay tuned.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Another major news agency has decided — in a very public announcement — that it will call the civil war in Iraq what it is. Here is NBC’s Brian Williams (I heard about this from TomPaine.com):

We will also reference our decision today (after much consultation over the weekend with our colleagues, fellow journalists, historians, analysts and members of the military, both present and former) to describe the fighting in Iraq as a Civil War. We believe it is a more accurate reflection of what is happening there, and there was a fair amount of reaction to the decision today… even though a number of news organizations have already made a similar call.

An “accurate reflection”? During the Bush years? Score one for the fact-based community.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

New Jersey conservatives are officially weighing in on the issue of gay marriage. As expected, they are planning to unveil a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman — an amendment that woudl write discrimination into law.

And they are planning to unveil a compromise domestic benefits bill that would grant all of the rights and benefits of marriage not only to gay couples, but to nearly every non-married living arrangement. On the surface this seems a useful compromise, but it falls short for two reasons. First, it ignores the psychic and social benefits that come with the marriage designation (a purposeful sleight). And, just as importantly, it would not cover heterosexual couples who choose not to marry because they would be eligible to marry — making it both unfair to gays and straights and unnecessarily coercive.

A better and fairer approach would be to include gay couples in a new marriage law while also creating a separate domestic benefits bill that would cover all of those arrangements short of marriage.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Milton Friedman was, no doubt, a great thinker. But his approach to economics has wrought serious damage to our economy and the classes of Americans who fail in his winner-take-all world. Leave it to William Greider to remind us of this when much of the press in the wake of Friedman’s death has been so laudatory.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick