The Senate will take up a bill "sometime this year" to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, according to a top Senate Democratic aide. In the House, a Republican leadership aide pointed to three items that GOP leaders say will help the poor: a welfare reform reauthorization bill, the Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills Act and a renewed focus on education. The problem is, none of those proposals have bipartisan support. The author of the minimum wage bill, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), has been predicting GOP resistance from the moment he introduced his bill. "Republicans will throw up a smokescreen about it costing jobs," he said at the bill's unveiling. The House Republican proposals, meanwhile, lack Democratic support, and their effectiveness is questionable. The welfare reform bill only targets 4 million of the nation's 46 million working poor, and the SKILLS Act, which would consolidate more than 30 workforce development programs into a single fund, would actually make it harder for vulnerable groups like the elderly and disabled to access job training, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

It's no particular secret that politicians do a much better job representing the interests of the wealthy than those of the poor. And Congress is doing a great job demonstrating that, with Republicans backing plans that will make things worse for poor people and even most Democrats only offering small-bore anti-poverty proposals (in part, but not entirely, because Republicans will block anything bigger). Jennifer Bendery runs through how bad the situation is "Their effectiveness is questionable" is a polite way to say "they're counterproductive if your goal isthe poor," obviously.

While it's Republicans actively blocking good policies and fighting for terrible ones, there are powerful reasons even many Democratic politicians aren't exactly throwing their hearts and souls and political capital into anti-poverty policies. As Mark Sumner reminded us Sunday:



Worried about the 1 percent? Don't be. Worry about the 0.05 percent. That's the percentage of Americans who maxed out their contribution to any political candidate in the last election. Or the 0.01 percent who made contributions of $10,000 or more. That's the number of Americans who actually show up on the radar of politicians. But those are only flyspecks on the screen. Save your real worry for the 0.000042 percent. That's 132 people. Those 132 people provided 60 percent of all the money that ended up in Super PACs.

Getting Republicans out of a position to block good legislation like increasing the minimum wage so that working people are less likely to also be poor people would be a great start. But to really make policy as likely to work for the poor (and working class, and middle class) as for the wealthy, we'd have to get big money out of politics.