Can Congress be embarrassed?

This week we will see if the Republicans in Congress still have enough decency left in them to be embarrassed into giving the lowest paid members of our society a raise. It hasn't been done since 1997. That fact alone should be embarrassing enough for them to raise it. Unfortunately, it's not so the Senate Democrats are going to try to shame them into voting the right way by blocking a congressional pay raise if the minimum wage is not increased.

How arrogant and out-of-touch with everyday people do you have to be to take a raise yourself and then say others don't deserve a raise? The answer is you have to be an entrenched incumbent that is poised to take a raise of more than $3,000 this year that will bring your total salary to $168,500 a year.

This may be the year that Congress pays for its arrogance on this issue though. Polling cited in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article has 83% of Americans agreeing with the Democrats that those making the minimum wage deserve a $2 raise. That same Pew poll showed 72% of Republicans think we should raise it that much too.

So how do the Republicans representing our state feel about raising the minimum wage? Rep. Mark Green and Rep. Paul Ryan say their corporate campaign backers need a handout first before they would back an increase. Rep. Tom Petri says he thinks people making the minimum wage can wait until they get tax refunds to get any sort of increase in their bottom line so he'd rather increase the Earned Income Tax Credit. I guess someone making as much money as Petri doesn't realize that bills won't wait to paid until early next year. And no one can be too surprised that Rep. James Sensenbrenner just flat out says "no" to a raise. When you've had money handed to you like he has, it's hard to get a grip on what working families go through.

Sensenbrenner and friends like to peddle two things about the minimum wage as their reasons for not supporting increases, and both of them are completely false. They like to tell people that only teenagers and trainees make the minimum wage so we don't need to raise it. The truth is that raising the minimum wage will help mostly adults. In fact, adult women alone were 43.2 percent of the beneficiaries that were helped by the last minimum wage increase.

The other 'fact' that those opposing the minimum wage like to shop around is that raising the minimum wage is a job killer, but the facts just don't back them up. Do you remember the big job losses after the 1997 increase? No? That's because our economy really took off soon after that. Numerous studies have looked at this and have found no significant job losses from increasing the minimum wage.

There is also a growing body of evidence that suggests just the opposite. After the state of Oregon passed a large minimum wage increase through a ballot initiative in 2002, studies found they had higher job growth than states that maintained the lower federal minimum wage. In fact, the Oregon Center for Public Policy found that Oregon had faster job growth than 41 other states.

The only job losses likely to occur from the minimum wage issue this time around is the congresspeople that don't listen to what their constituents want, and vote against the $2 minimum wage increase. And those are job losses many will applaud.