Tom Harkin: “the average CEO in America today makes $11.8 million a year. The average salaried worker makes $27,460 a year. That is…”

“the average CEO in America today makes $11.8 million a year. The average salaried worker makes $27,460 a year. That is 431 times what the average worker makes. That is the average worker. Take a minimum wage worker at $10,600 a year. The average CEO makes a thousand times more a year, a thousand times more than a minimum wage worker. So you can see the disparity has gotten out of hand. In the wake of Katrina, in a speech in New Orleans, President Bush proclaimed: We should confront poverty with bold action. We are just trying to raise the minimum wage for the first time in 9 years, and we can't even do that. We can have tax reductions for the wealthy on and on and on; they seem to be sacrosanct, untouchable; but we can't raise the minimum wage. The working poor have to do with $5.15 an hour. This is unconscionable. We have to do something about it. Have Members of the Senate all joined the Neiman Marcus crowd? Have we become so totally insulated from the realities of real life for the people who work and shop at Wal-Mart and K-Mart, Dollar stores, who pinch their pennies, who go to the grocery store and spend the time looking for the best bargains, have we become so insulated from them that we can't see the need to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour? Poverty has doubled since the late 1970s among full-time, year-round workers from about 1.3 million to more than 2.6 million.…”