Recent polls show more than 80 percent of Americans favoring at least a $2-per-hour increase in the minimum wage, which has been unchanged at $5.15 an hour since 1997. If you work full time at this rate, you will earn the princely sum of $10,700 -- well below the roughly $20,000 needed to keep a family of four above the federal poverty level.

The purchasing power of the minimum wage is estimated to be at its lowest level since 1955 when taking inflation into account. And economic analysts say a triple whammy of rising costs for health care, housing and transportation, combined with rising interest rates, and slow job growth is making minimum wage an issue that resonates with millions of low and middle-income Americans.   House Democrats have offered a number of motions on the House Floor to gradually raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour by 2009, which I've supported.  Unfortunately, these motions were defeated by the Republican majority that currently controls the House.

In Massachusetts, our own legislature acted in July to increase the state minimum wage. It had to override a veto by Governor Mitt Romney, but at least in the Commonwealth the bill was not used as a ploy to try to force passage of a tax break for the plutocracy.  And in Massachusetts, Republican members of both chambers ended up joining the Democrats. The House voted 152 to 0 to override Romney, and minutes later the Senate voted 38 to 0.

But in the U.S. Congress, the Republican party would only agree to consider the minimum wage as a sweetener to a bill intended to increase the wealth of the most wealthy  8,200 families in America through a tax cut that would exempt from taxation all estates worth as much as $5 million per individual, or $10 million for a couple.

Nothing could more starkly demonstrate the alternative universe in which the Republican leaders in Washington are living  At a time when our soldiers are dying in a failed adventure in Iraq, small businesses are collapsing under the weight of $3.00 per gallon gasoline, and workers are seeing their downsized jobs pop up overseas,  Congressional Republican s decided that they  were going to deliver a big one to Mr.Big.  Mr. Big, in this case, is that tiny fraction of Americans – Paris Hilton, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among them –who would directly benefit from an expansion of  the estate tax.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have, to their credit, said they oppose the elimination of the estate tax (no word yet from Paris!) Mr. Buffett, for example, who ranks fourth on the Forbes magazine list of the richest Americans, has called the estate tax critical to promoting economic growth, by helping create a society in which success is based on merit rather than inheritance.

But that hasn’t deterred the Bush Administration and its Congressional lieutenants from making it their highest priority.  It is estimated that the estate tax exemptions added by this bill would increase the already-bloated federal deficit by another $268 billion over the first ten years, and balloon upwards thereafter.

So for those of us who believe that it is government’s role to reduce poverty and provide everyone willing to work with a livable wage, we will return in September with renewed energy to force an increase in the minimum wage.  But we will face a Republican party which was only narrowly thwarted in its attempt to use the minimum wage as a ploy to award some of the wealthiest people on earth yet another tax break.  In this debate, I intend to do everything in my power to ensure that the US Congress gives a $2 per hour wage increase to the common man and woman without caving to the demands of those who would give a $1.3 million per beneficiary tax break to the uncommon millionaire.