A glimmer of hope

'No one who works full-time should have to live in poverty,' but at $7.25, they do

President Obama in his recent state of the union address proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00.

Republicans have, of course, flat refused and taken the opportunity to declaim against the Marxist, socialist, communist, anti-American, and un-American idea that there should even be such a thing.

Making it all the nicer that Democrats and liberals can remember the working class, once in a while, without yelling about race.

But have you noticed that when liberals address a class war issue without yelling about race they don’t yell, at all?

You can barely hear them.

They almost whisper.

Laura Clawson writes,

A minimum wage of $9.00 an hour still represents minimum-wage workers falling behind by many measures.

Depending how you calculate it, if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages, it might have been close to $10.50 today.

If it had kept pace with productivity, it might have been more than $18.50.

And if it had kept pace with the growth of wages to the top one percent?

Forget about it—when union members in skilled professions make that much these days, they get attacked as greedy.

And she makes a crucial point.

It's time to stop keeping people working hard to support themselves and their families stuck below the poverty level.

And, with the last increase to the minimum wage having come in 2009, it's important to tie the minimum wage to inflation so that workers don't have to wait years for their next raise.