Economic issues make some people's eyes glaze over, so we'll put this plainly: Today's minimum wage is epic in its injustice and Dickensian in its cruelty. It's a shame that Dickens himself isn't here to write about it.

Oh, and we almost forgot: Keeping it this low isn't very smart, either.

A new report provides a good opportunity to revisit the subject, which leads to an inescapable conclusion: Raising the minimum wage isn't just the right thing to do. It's also economic common sense.

Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller have a new minimum-wage proposal that's worth fighting for. Here's why:

Most low-wage workers work for large corporations, not Mom-and-Pop businesses.

Many people assume that most minimum-wage employees work for small, family-owned businesses. But a new Data Brief from the National Employment Law Project finds that 66 percent of low-wage employees work for companies with more than 100 employees. That includes a handful of very large corporations which collectively employ nearly 8 million low-wage employees.

The largest of those mega-corporations is, unsurprisingly, Wal-Mart, with 1,400,000 employees. The next-largest is Yumi Foods, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC. After Yumi Foods comes McDonald's.

(And after that, one assumes, comes Alka-Seltzer.)

Also on the list is Staples, Inc., the corporation where Mitt Romney boasts that he "created jobs" before his retroactive resignation from Bain Capital. (Can he retroactively give out some raises, too?)

These employers are "job takers," not "job creators."

Staples, like Wal-Mart ...

Over the past week, the business news has been filled with stories about major British banks manipulating the LIBOR rate. While these stories are undoubtedly confusing to most of the public, which is not generally familiar with the intricacies of different interest rate indexes, the basic story is fairly simple: Big banks were caught lying about interest rates in order to make big profits.

For the most part the victims were other high-rollers who were taking the other side of bets on complex financial derivatives. However there were also pension funds and even governmental units such as school districts and park services that were persuaded by their financial advisers to get into this high-stakes game. These folks were among those who lost because of the LIBOR liars.

A Fundamental Problem

While there should be a thorough investigation that results in the guilty parties being severely punished, this incident sheds light on the fundamental problem with the modern financial industry. There is enormous money to be made by shaving a small fraction of a penny here or there. When this shaving is done on trades that can run into the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, those fractions of a penny can run into really big bucks. And when we give people enormous incentive to lie and steal, it is likely that many will take advantage of the opportunity.

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At 58, retired machinist Bruce Revers is tethered to his oxygen machines — a wall unit when he’s at home, a portable tank when he’s out. The simple act of walking to the curb to pick up his newspaper is a grind.

“This is a hell of a thing to live with,” Revers, of Orange, Calif., said of his worsening lung disease. “There’s nothing I can do without my air.”

His undoing was beryllium, a light and versatile metal to which he was exposed in a Southern California factory that makes high-tech ceramics for the space, defense and automotive industries. His bosses tried to keep the place clean and well-ventilated, Revers says, and he wore a respirator to shield his lungs from the fine metallic dust. Nonetheless, he was diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease in 2009.

He will not recover.

The federal standard in place to protect workers like Revers from beryllium is based on an Atomic Energy Commission calculation crafted by an industrial hygienist and a physician in the back of a taxi in 1949. For the last 12 years, an effort to update that standard has been mired in delay. A plan to ...

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has called for a federal investigation into "whether South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley exploited taxpayer dollars for political purposes" by allegedly dictating the findings of a nonpartisan health care panel, according to a news release.

Harkin cited a report last week from the (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier in which Haley told leaders of the South Carolina Health Planning Committee in an email that the committee was to figure out a way to opt out of a requirement in the new federal health care law requiring states to set up health insurance exchanges.

Haley established the committee with the help of a $1 million federal grant that was designed to help states figure out how to implement the new health care reforms. The state has so far spent about $109,000 of that money.

"It was certainly not the intent for those taxpayer funds to be distributed for a predetermined and meaningless outcome," Harkin said in a news release. "Spending taxpayer funds to construct an ideologically motivated facade not only violates Congress's intent, but also the public's trust in government."

Haley's office scoffed at the request.

"This is a joke," said Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey. "Governor Haley has long been on record opposing Obamacare and its exchanges, and she remains committed to keeping them out of South Carolina. ...

"I suggest the liberal senator from Iowa is better off investigating how pro-Obamacare governors are wasting tens of millions of tax dollars studying how to implement a fatally flawed and unconstitutional law that will hopefully soon be struck down by the Supreme Court."

Tony Keck, director of the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and an influential member of the Health Planning Committee, said the committee met in public sessions, discussed the possibilities and voted on its recommendations. He ...