Just saw Ted Kennedy’s recent speech on the Senate floor, in which he lashes out at Republicans for holding up a vote on legislation to raise the minimum wage. I’ve never seen him so angry before – it’s quite a sight to behold.

Raising the minimum wage isn’t the most targeted way of helping the nation’s working poor families, since most people who work for the minimum wage come from households living above the poverty line (see this report from the Congressional Budget Office for figures). Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax benefit that makes work pay for low-wage workers, should also receive serious consideration – especially proposals to increase this credit for workers without children, who "pay a strikingly high percentage of their small incomes in federal taxes." That said, a minimum-wage increase would lift hundreds of thousands of working families out of poverty, and economists are divided over whether this legislation would increase unemployment.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to raise the minimum wage is that it’s simply the right thing to do. People who work should get a decent wage for their labor. There’s something morally amiss in a country that has let the value of its minimum wage dwindle amid inflation for the past decade, while the pay of CEOs has risen astronomically. In 1990, the average CEO made 107 times more than the average worker; the gap in 2005 was 411-to-one. When does the greed stop?

UPDATE, 6/11/12: Removed broken links to economists’ views on minimum wage.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen