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As I said before, the President's proposal is a simple 50-cent increase on September 1, 1999, and a 50-cent increase on September 1, 2000. As I said before, that would bring the minimum

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   50 weeks in a year, still much too low but an important improvement.

   Congress did raise the minimum wage by 50 cents in 1996 and 40 cents on September 1, 1997, and this time we propose to do it, through the President's proposal, a little better than that.

   The minimum wage is still low in historical terms. The value of the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968, when the value in real dollar terms was $7.49 in terms of dollars, dollar values in 1998. We were up that high, $7.49 in 1968.

   During President Reagan's 8 years in office, the real value of the minimum wage went down by about 25 percent. Today, even after the 90-cent increase that President Clinton pushed through Congress, the minimum wage is only $5.15 an hour, and the new proposal would increase it by another $1 in two steps. This last increase in percentage terms is in line with previous ones that helped low wage workers without adversely affecting the economy. Both this proposal and the last one increased the minimum wage by about 20 percent.

   I could go on and on, but I do not want to talk more about facts related to the minimum wage . I think the point is made, that no studies have been brought forward to show that the economy is in any way harmed by an increase in the minimum wage . Workers certainly are not harmed by losing jobs. Unemployment now is much higher than it was when the minimum wage increase started 2 years ago.

   States have minimum wages. A few of them have minimum wages larger than the Federal Government minimum wage , but some States, of course, have no minimum wage , and often do not abide by the Federal minimum wage . They have a lot of jobs that do not pay even the minimum wage .

   I think Texas, if we want to look at the largest number of people earning the minimum wage , Texas has 211,000 in its State, and 4.2 percent of the work force is earning minimum wage . They have another 838,000 people who earn between $5.15 an hour and $6.14 cents an hour. That comes to 16.6 percent of the work force at very low wage levels.

   So we need to share the wealth. If we have $3 trillion, if we move from $3 trillion to $13 trillion on the stock market, there is no sound argument for not raising the minimum wage . Of all the ways to share the wealth, the best and easiest way, the most direct way, is to increase the dollars in the pockets of the workers. Working families need more money.

   So I appreciate the fact that we are not openly attacking workers, as we did in the 105th Congress. I appreciate the fact that the first bill on the agenda was not a bill to take away overtime, as we did in the 105th Congress.

   I appreciate the fact that we are not any longer waging war on labor unions, to take away their ability to speak for their workers by having a so-called Paycheck Protection Act, which throttles the voices of unions. I appreciate the fact that there are no loud voices being raised to try to end Davis-Bacon for Federal contract jobs.

   But the truth is, in all of these areas there is still a guerilla war going on. The guerilla war is more subtle. The guerilla war is designed to hoodwink working families.

   Davis-Bacon is being attacked behind the scenes. Davis-Bacon is being again used as a scapegoat for not approving a massive school construction appropriation. They are saying that Davis-Bacon drives up the cost of school construction, despite the fact that there have been several scientific studies which show that Davis-Bacon does not drive up the cost.

   Mr. Peter Phillips has made several studies showing that if we remove Davis-Bacon, the cost may remain the same or go higher, but what happens is that the wages of the workers go down and the profits of the contractors go up. That is the only thing we accomplish when we remove Davis-Bacon from contracts.

   State Davis-Bacon laws, similar State Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws have been changed in certain Midwestern States. They have seen that it does not lower the cost of school construction, it only raises the profits of contractors. So Davis-Bacon should not be an issue.

   However, in the circles of Congress there is still talk of blocking any appropriation for school construction because of Davis-Bacon, or holding school construction appropriations hostage by saying that we will do it only if you get rid of Davis-Bacon.

   I understand the Committee on Ways and Means has made some steps forward in terms of the Democratic leadership over there. The ranking Democrat on the Committee on Ways and Means recently announced in a session of the Congressional Black Caucus that he would certainly support the continuation of Davis-Bacon on the school construction bill proposed through Committee on Ways and Means.

   That is the President's proposal that we borrow $25 billion, and the States and local governments would be helped by the Federal Government, by the Federal Government paying the interest through a tax credit vehicle on the $25 billion for school construction.

   So I hope that the guerilla warfare will cease. We had some problems recently in the subcommittee on Workforce Protections, my subcommittee where I serve as the ranking Democrat. We had a problem with an attempt to get rid of bonuses as part of the computation of the rate of pay for a worker.

   If we remove the bonuses, then the hourly rate of the worker goes down, and we can have the worker work overtime and he gets less money if the bonus is not computed as part of his hourly pay. That is what we call a bushwacking, an ambush of the working families, to try to take away their overtime through a much less visible approach.

[Time: 20:30]

   H.R. 1 was a highly visible direct assault by mandating, it called for mandating the use of comp time instead of cash payments for overtime. So we would like to see working families not have to fight so hard to get their share of the wealth.

   I would like to even go further and say that the problem of Social Security, problem of health care, we should look at taxing unearned income. Unearned income may be the source of the solution to the Social Security problem. If we would put a Social Security tax, as I am proposing, on unearned income, we would guarantee Social Security for an infinite number of years in the future.

   At the same time, we could lift the tax off the backs of the workers. Working families have had the biggest tax increase over the last two decades through the payroll tax. Most people do not realize that because they do not look at taxes in that way. But the payroll tax increase has been not a progressive tax, but a regressive tax, and fallen on the backs of wage earners. At the same time, we have had this tremendous increase in wealth for the people who have unearned income.

   I did not invent these two terms. These are economic terms that have been around for a long time. Earned income is the income of working people, the people who earn wages. Those dollars are called earned income. Investments and income from rent and other sources are called unearned income.

   I do not know why we discriminate against earned income and all the taxes are just on earned income. Only 11 percent of unearned income is taxed. We ought to take a look at a tax reduction policy for working families. That is another issue that should be considered.

   But, first of all and foremost, I think that the current consideration is the need for a bipartisan approach to the passage of a meaningful increase in the minimum wage , a meaningful increase. We do not want a bipartisan increase. The bipartisanism forces us to sacrifice the reality of it.

   The reality is that no less than $1 over a 2-year period is acceptable. We need so much more than that. Consider the $13 trillion versus the $3 trillion, and my colleagues will see the kind of magnitude that our wealth has increased by.

   No less should happen in terms of the various programs that we, as the policymakers here in Congress, approve for working families. We need to help working families through health care. We need to help working families by providing health care plans and health care systems that take care of everybody.

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   We need to help working families by increasing Federal aid to education, first of all building more schools and better schools and repairing schools and modernizing schools and equipping schools with the technology that they need.

   Finally, we need to help working families first of all, most immediately and most directly, by passing immediately an increase in the minimum wage .

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