Last week, the Senate voted to reject an increase in the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15.

The vote went almost strictly along party lines 55-44 against.

This was not top news. Not “in-your-face-24-hours-a-day-rating’s-booster” top news.

While the embarrassing spectacle of presidential pleasures continues its parade across the nightly news programs, our nation’s creedless leaders will have free reign to get away with murder.

$6.15 is a joke to begin with. $5.15 is beyond laughable, it is criminal.

The fact that Republicans can fail so miserably to support such a minute raise for America’s workers only proves once again how far removed from the common man they truly are.

The only way to ensure a raise in the minimum wage will be to tack a Congressional pay raise onto such a bill.

Right now, millions of Americans are earning $5.15 an hour while our economy is reported to be moving along swimmingly.

The truth is that the buying power of Americans at the lowest end of the job market is being eroded slowly but surely.

The issue is not one of luxury items.

The minimum wage decides where the division is between barely making it and living in a homeless shelter and eating out of a soup kitchen.

Republicans would have us believe that our economy can only thrive while those at the bottom are deprived of a living wage.

They foresee economic upheaval if hourly wages are increased even marginally.

They predict that there would be fewer jobs available nation-wide for low income workers.

The irony of this is that while they are preventing the poor of much-needed income, they would have us believe that their primary concern is for the well-being our nation’s poorest.

The Economic Policy Institute found that there were no perceptible job losses among entry level positions when the last raise went into effect.

The truth is that Republicans are concerned with the profit margins of big business, and if a few million people who don’t earn enough to contribute to political campaigns have to be ground underfoot, then so be it.

The measure of any civilization should be how well it takes care of those at the bottom of the economic scale, not how well it maintains the privileges of those at the top.