On Monday, March 7, Congress again voted against raising the minimum wage. Republicans believe Ted Kennedy’s proposed $7.25 an hour is bad for the entry-level workers the increase is meant to benefit. Democrats refuse to accept the $6.25 that was the Republican counter, not wanting any truck with such a niggardly offer.

And so, our elected officials bark, bargain, and balk, but they still draw their $162,100 a year, while America’s lowest paid legal work force is again given the shaft.

In truth, either amount would have been preferable to more than half a million workers currently earning $5.15 an hour — and that‘s excluding the 1.6 million who earn even less (according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics). Raising the minimum wage is hot — so hot, in fact, that Congress has not risked burning its hands on the issue since it raised it to its current level in 1996.

I remember the minimum wage jobs I held in high school and for eight years after. I remember having no insurance, never seeing a dentist, never buying new clothes, (well, I still consignment shop), not being able to save a down payment for a house, and living paycheck to paycheck. It was not always bad. I was young, and youth itself made up for what the lack of funds denied me. For seven of those years I was also a student, so the prospect of what lay ahead always buoyed me when lack of money seemed overwhelming.

And though my husband’s parents and mine paid the rent more than once, I still managed not to move back home and so become one of the earners used by the GOP as an argument against the wage increase. Their claim — that 41 percent of minimum wage earners (including teen-agers) do not need the raise because they live with a parent or relative — is overrated as an argument. Logic would suggest that many of these people live with relatives because they cannot afford rent. In other words, they just might move out if they earned more money.

Again and again, from the conservative Web site www.minimumwage.com to an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor, I read that this 41 percent would likely spend their extra $84 a week (for a 40-hour workweek) on iPods and the like. However, this has not been my experience with the teen-agers in Swain County. The students I teach who work outside of school (and that’s almost all of them), sling burgers, man cash registers, clean rooms, and mow grass to buy school clothes and school supplies, help out at home, and make car payments. Although the car payments may sound like a luxury, if a family’s budget requires that the children contribute financially as soon as they can drive, a good used car becomes a necessity.

So even though some teen-agers may be gaining status with a new mp3 player, chances are there are even more buying a required Texas Instruments calculator, the one that the school’s budget couldn’t supply, or maybe just bread and milk to get through the week. So an $84-a-week gain might mean working teenagers have to make fewer hard choices — like choosing between auto insurance or saving for a semester at the local community college, between buying gas or making monthly payments on braces. Therefore, from my perspective, the argument about 41 percent of minimum wage earners being poorly targeted seems more than a little specious.

Equally specious is the argument based on Cornell University research “which found that African-American young adults suffer four times more employment loss from a minimum wage increase than other affected employees.” In one Minnesota newspaper editorial, a columnist draws on data from 1956, a year in which the minimum wage was increased by 33 percent, also citing that “by 1960, unemployment for young black males ... nearly doubled to 22.7 percent while increasing slightly for young whites.” He neglects to mention that the dates coincide with the Civil Rights movement.

He also fails to take his argument to its logical conclusion: if blatant bias is accepted as a legitimate argument against raising wages, then by the same premise more uneducated black males could find gainful employment if they weren’t paid at all. But wait, haven’t we already tried that?

Or, speaking of minorities, as a prospective business major at WCU stated last year, “I have no problem with hiring Mexicans over white people for low-paying jobs. Somebody has to do the work the rest of us won’t touch.”

Along these optimistic lines, the conservative Employment Policies Institute asserts that “nearly two-thirds of the people hired at minimum wage receive wage increases within the first year,” and “receive raises at a rate nearly six times larger than everyone else.” But it does not say what those raises are, nor does it state what seems obvious to me — that it is easy to raise employees’ wages by a quarter or 50 cents an hour when the beginning rate is only $5.15 an hour. It would appear, even without knowing the specifics of any given company, that since minimum wage law applies only to companies earning a minimum of $500,000 a year, paying employees an extra $84 a week imposes no hardship to speak of.

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal organization representing working people, says that one adult and two children require a yearly income of $30,000 to meet basic needs, including food, housing, child care, transportation, health care, and taxes. Raising the minimum wage to Kennedy’s suggested rate would provide $15,080 a year, or only half of that amount. However, that is still a good bit closer than the $10,712 entry-level workers earn now.

I continue to hear people say that people in my profession are underpaid, but I have no complaints about my salary. As far as my finances go, I’ve left behind the world of minimum wage. Every day, however, my students remind me of generational poverty‘s cyclical nature, and low wages only drive the cycle harder. Education was the opportunity I took hold of in my early 20s, and I still swear by it as the best way out. But for the poor who don’t have that particular escape route, it sure would be nice if Congress could see it’s way to offering them some kind of bootstrap — instead of once again giving them the boot.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County and lives in Sylva. She can be reached at playboat8@aol.com.)