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People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

Although they are some of the hardest working folks I know, rural Americans earn, on average, $11,000 less than their urban counterparts each year. And they are more likely to live in poverty.

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works a full time job should have to live in poverty. That's a fundamental value proposition, an article of faith in our country that I know an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on.

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

We've got to do more to ensure that people who work full time are not living in poverty and that the massive gap between rich and poor - which is fundamentally un-American, as far as I'm concerned - is somehow dealt with.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don't like to think of themselves as poor.