Minimum Wage Fairness Act -- Motion to Proceed -- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I say to my colleague from Wyoming that I disagree with him on this issue, but I do agree wholeheartedly with his observation about the importance of training people for this 21st century economy, and I have enjoyed working with him so much on the HELP Committee.

I am on the floor today to talk about the minimum wage bill that is before us this week, and once again to have the opportunity to come here and say that Washington, DC, is absolutely decoupled with the conversations people are having in Colorado, whether they are Republicans, Democrats or Independents. We had another example of that here today during this debate--if you can call it a debate--because once again there are people in the Senate who are using their prerogatives as Senators to keep us from debating a bill fully and to keep us from actually having an up-or-down vote on a bill that the vast majority of Americans support whether they are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents.

There is a reason why America supports this legislation. If you work 40 hours a week in the United States of America--the greatest country in the world--at a Federal minimum wage, you barely make over $15,000 a year. If you work 40 hours a week--week after week after week--you make $15,000 a year. A worker in this country with a spouse and two kids, a family of four--a typical family in this country--depending on the single minimum wage paycheck is in deep trouble. They are not just below the minimum wage, that family makes two-thirds of the poverty level.

A breadwinner in a family of four working at the minimum wage is more than $8,000 below the poverty line. That family with a full-time breadwinner is impoverished in the United States of America to the tune of $8,000. If you have a family who depends on you to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table, that is not enough to get by. It is not even close.

It may be hard for people here who are paid $174,000 a year to understand what it would be like to live on $15,000, but let's think a little bit about what that family's life is like. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that even under the cheapest plan possible--the thriftiest plan possible--where the family cuts every single corner, spending as little as can be spent, it costs over $7,000 a year to feed a family of four with growing kids. It costs $7,000 under the most difficult circumstances possible. At least half of that family's $15,000 paycheck goes just to groceries--just to feeding a family and keeping them nourished. After payroll taxes, that leaves a family with less than $7,000 to cover every other cost--that is it. Food is half of what you bring home and you are left with $7,000.

In Denver, where my family lives, the average rental unit costs over $12,000 a year. That is an average. That includes tiny studio apartments. In Denver, this family of four would have to squeeze into a rental unit well under half that cost. They would need to live in a space woefully inadequate for their needs, their family, and their children. That family would have to stretch their pocket change--and whatever is left after they spend the money they barely have to feed and house their children--to cover utilities, medicine, health, clothes, transportation, school supplies, and the countless other expenses that life throws at us. It cannot be done. It is simple arithmetic.

A family such as the one I just described needs thousands of additional dollars from the Federal and local government just to get by. We don't want to have a minimum wage that is so low that people who are working 40 hours a week have to be on public assistance just to support their families. Think about how crazy that is. Someone working full time, 40 hours a week in a minimum wage job today, needs thousands of dollars in support from the Government to provide for their family. That is not what we want in America.

The situation is a lot worse than it used to be because the minimum wage is not indexed to inflation. So as costs rise, the minimum wage loses its purchasing power and stays the same until Congress raises it, which is why we are trying to have this debate here. There is no one else who can do this in America. Democratic and Republican Congresses that have dealt with this over the years have found ways to do it. Congress has raised the minimum wage over and over for precisely that reason.

Even so, today, as we stand on this floor with the responsibility to the American people, our minimum wage is down substantially from where it used to be. The Federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour. That is $3.44 an hour and more than $7,000 a year below what it was in 1968 in real inflation-adjusted dollars. It is a $7,000 gap, which makes a huge difference to the family of four we just considered trying to survive on the minimum wage.

In 1968, a minimum wage job kept a family of three out of poverty. That is what the Congress did in 1968. They

said if you work 40 hours a week, your family ought to live above the poverty line. A full-time worker with two children was 20 percent above the poverty line. Today that same family is 19 percent below the poverty line all because the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. It also has not kept pace with average earnings.

In 1968, the minimum wage was 54 percent of the average hourly pay for a U.S. worker; today it is just 36 percent. At the same time, even when you account for inflation, college costs are three times what they were four decades ago. It is no wonder that the working families I hear from in Colorado feel they are working harder than ever before but falling farther behind.

The bill we are talking about today raises the Federal minimum wage by 39 percent to $10.10 an hour. That is actually less than the 47-percent increase that is required to get back to the 1968 level. So we are still not going to be back where we were in 1968, but we will make progress in the sense that the people who are earning minimum wage will no longer be living in poverty.

Consider what this bill does for a family's ability to provide for itself. Look at just one major Federal safety net program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Food stamps is what that is. The reason the House of Representatives held up the farm bill for so long was over the issue of food stamps. As we think about what we are doing here and the debate we are having, I think that is important to keep in context. This is a program that millions of low-income families depend on in order to eat.

This minimum wage bill would reduce SNAP enrollments by over 7 1/2 percent because people would now be making a living wage. That is over 3.1 million Americans who would no longer have to depend on a program to feed their kids. If you vote for this legislation, you are voting to reduce the roles of those who depend on food stamps by 3 million Americans. It is not a virtue that we have those 3 million Americans on food stamps. They ought to be earning a living wage. We would save $46 billion in SNAP payments over the next decade if we pass this bill.

It applies to other programs as well. Two-thirds of Americans who earn under $10 an hour use public assistance in some form--two-thirds, two-thirds, two-thirds. Working families--Americans who actually have a job who are working 40 hours a week--cost the Government about $243 million a year through programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and other safety-net programs. Raising the minimum wage makes American workers less dependent on these programs to support their families.

There are many compelling reasons to raise the minimum wage. There is a compelling reason why all the surveys show that the American people, no matter what party they are in, think we ought to raise the minimum wage. Yet in a few hours, if nothing changes, a minority of Senators will most likely not even come to the floor to vote on this but will use their powers in the Senate to block an honest up-or-down vote about whether we ought to raise the minimum wage in this country. They don't even want us to have a proper debate on this bill much less pass it.

What is so radical about what we are trying to do that they won't even let us have an up or down vote? Is this somehow unprecedented? Is what we are talking about unknown in the annals of the Senate? Actually, it is not. Since the minimum wage was enacted by the Congress in the 1930s, we have managed to raise the minimum wage on 10 different occasions over 70 years. We have raised the minimum wage very routinely to try--not always successfully--to keep pace with inflation. We have done it many times.

Democratic and Republican Congresses have raised the minimum wage. Democratic Presidents have signed minimum wage increases into law and Republican Presidents have signed minimum wage increases into law. President Eisenhower signed a 33-percent increase in the minimum wage in 1955. President Nixon signed a 44-percent minimum wage increase into law in 1974. George H. W. Bush signed a 27-percent minimum wage increase into law in 1989. In 1996, a Republican-controlled Congress enacted a 21-percent minimum wage increase which President Clinton signed into law. Most recently in 2007, President George W. Bush signed a 41-percent increase into law.

You can see on this chart all the different times the minimum wage has been raised and by how much. If you look at the 10 different times we have increased the minimum wage, the average increase has been about 41 percent. This increase increases it by 39 percent, and that is below average. But to hear some people talk, you would think this bill is an unprecedented assault on American capitalism.

Tom Delay described the minimum wage earlier this year as unconstitutional. Others have said it doesn't affect a lot of workers. Several years ago the Speaker--before he was Speaker--said he would ``commit suicide before [he voted] on a clean minimum-wage bill.'' This makes no sense. It is at war with our history.

I see my colleagues are here.

I ask and beg my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are not allowing us to have an up-or-down vote on something that the American people want--whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Independents--to allow us to have that vote.

With that, I yield the floor.

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