Living Like It's 1997

WASHINGTON, July 12, 2006 — -- Back when the average price of gas was $1.72 a gallon, Congress voted to raise the federal minimum wage 30 cents to $5.15 an hour. Since then, the price of gas has almost doubled to just over $3 a gallon. But the federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15.

While the minimum wage has remained stagnant, the price of the Big Mac at McDonald's, where starting workers make the minimum wage, went from $2.42 to an average of $3.10 in 2006, according to the Economist magazine's annual Big Mac index.

That's a 28 percent increase in the price of the ubiquitous burger, which tracks with the 24 percent increase (more than $30,000) in congressional salaries over the same period. Senators and congressmen make $183,500 each year in government salary, plus they get health care and retirement benefits. So a Big Mac puts about the same dent in a senator or congressman's daily budget now as it did in 1997.

And Congress is set to get its annual 2 percent cost of living raise again this year.

In that same nine years, the salary for presidents has increased even more, from $200,000 when President Clinton left office to $400,000 now.

But Democrats on Capitol Hill are making the minimum wage a cornerstone of their legislative agenda leading up to the 2006 midterm elections. They have held three Capitol Hill news conferences on the issue in the past month.

"A job ought to be a way to get you out of poverty, not a way to keep you in poverty," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, at the most recent press conference -- today -- when he plugged a bill written by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., that would attach cost-of-living increases for lawmakers to a cost-of-living increase for the minimum wage.

It is a good issue for the Democrats.

While slim majorities in both of the Republican-controlled houses support raising the minimum wage, the Republican leaders who control what makes it to the floors of the House and Senate say that raising the minimum wage will put stress on businesses, thereby actually hurting workers and the economy.