Quote

Once again, the Republicans in the Senate have rejected an increase in the minimum wage. They support tax breaks for multi-millionaires, but they oppose helping the working poor to earn a decent income.

No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.

I know in the past Republicans have agreed to minimum-wage increases that there's built-in protections for small and midsize businesses.

When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we're not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We're talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.

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 certainly could have voted on making the middle-class tax cuts and tax cuts for working families permanent had the Republicans not insisted that the only way they would support those tax breaks is if we also added $700 billion to the deficit to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. That's what was really disturbing.

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

It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.

The current minimum wage simply is not supporting Ohio's working families.

Republicans are not going to play I-told-you-so, but it is pretty obvious that the tax reductions passed in 2003 helped Americans dig out of a recession and get back to work.