Hightower Lowdown

Time for another Gooberhead Award presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues going 100 miles an hour...but forgot to put their brains in gear.

Today, I've got a whole gaggle of Goobers—all U.S. senators! These are the 49 Solons who recently voted to kill an increase in America's minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1996. That comes out to about $10,500 a year for full-time work! Try making ends meet on that, as millions of Americans now have to do. It's a moral outrage that in the richest country in the history of the world, people working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, receive poverty paychecks. This is why Democratic senators offered an increase to $7.25 an hour. That's about $15,000 a year—hardly the Life of Reilly, but better. "No," shouted the 49 senators, all Republicans.

Gooberhead Mike Enzi got all ideological about it: "Wages do not cause sales," he intoned. "Sales are needed to provide wages. Wages do not cause revenue. Revenue drives wages." Hey Mike, raise wages of working families and—and guess what—sales go up in local businesses. And corporate revenues have been going up for years—so why haven't wages?

These Goobers even tried to use the minimumwage bill to give more tax breaks to their corporate backers, cut the over-time pay protections of workers, and ban states from raising the minimum wage for restaurant workers. To be fair, though, the senators aren't entirely against wage increases. They've raised their own pay every year for the last five years—a total of $28,500.