Minimum Wage Breaks No-Raise Record

[RedEarth]

Every year, PNC Wealth Management calculates the "Christmas Price Index" based on gifts in the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." PNC reports, "Maids-a-Milking, who are paid the minimum wage, were the only service providers not to see an increase this year."

The Christmas Price Index rose from $13,344 in 1997 to $18,920 in 2006. The price of Six Geese-a-Laying increased from $150 to $300, for example. But the cost of Eight Maids-a-Milking remained $41.20 -- pegged to the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour since Sept. 1, 1997.

On Dec. 2, we break the record for the longest period without a raise since the minimum wage was established in 1938. The prior record of nine years and three months lasted from Jan. 1, 1981 until the minimum wage increase on Apr. 1, 1990.

Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of President Reagan's first Council of Economic Advisers, has acknowledged they wanted to eliminate the minimum wage. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, "Because that would have been such a 'painful political process,' Mr. Weidenbaum says that he and other officials were content to let inflation turn the minimum wage into 'an effective dead letter.'"

Today's minimum wage is less than the 1950 minimum of $6.28, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. It takes nearly two workers to match the $9.28 buying power of one minimum wage worker in 1968.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1202-22.htm

[Captain Hilts]

1. This is a crime. Link raises to: congressional pay raises, The Economist's Big Mac Index...

and/or PNC's 12 index.