Nine bucks won't cut it.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Minimum-wage

In the wealthiest nation on Earth," President Obama declared in his State of the Union speech, "no one who works fulltime should have to live in poverty."

When I heard him say that, I said, "Way to go!" Finally, I thought, he's put some real pop into populism.

But then came the number: $9 an hour.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but if you're going to bother making the fight, why start out with a number so low that many minimum-wage employees would still "have to live in poverty"?

About 60 percent of Americas lowest-paid workers are women, including single moms struggling awfully hard to make ends meet. Yet, at your $9 an hour level, a single woman with two children, would, in fact, be paid a poverty wage. And, since you would slowly phase in the increase, she wouldn't even be paid that until nearly two years from now.

Yes, nine bucks is a buck-seventy-five better than the current low wage of high misery, but it doesn't even elevate the buying power of our nation's wage floor back to where it was in 1968. Nor, by the way, does it match the $9.50 level you pledged to push in 2008 when you were running for President.

This is not merely about extending a badly needed helping hand to people struggling to work their way out of poverty, but also about enabling them to give a bottom-up jolt of new energy to our economy, which it desperately needs. Ironically, while super-rich corporations are hoarding trillions of dollars in offshore accounts, refusing to invest in our nation, minimum-wage workers would invest every extra dollar they get in America--spending it right where they live, on clothing, food, transportation, health care, and other needs.

Yes, I know that Congressional Republicans' idea of governing is first to snarl no and only then ask what the proposal is. So they instantly delivered a loud negative to any wage hike, and when Obama proposed $9, House Speaker John Boehner jumped on it like a gator on a poodle.

Incredibly, he claimed that raising the wages of our country's most poorly paid workers would hurt--guess who?--America's most poorly paid workers! This disingenuous pitting of poor people against...