It's that time of year again: for the cost-of-living adjustment for the House and Senate and Supreme Court Justices. Every year Congress is given an automatic 2.7 percent raise, unless there is a proposal passed to have a collective vote to rescind it.

Before 1989, Congressional pay raises were debated. No kidding. Congressional Committees held public hearings and open floor debates with every member of Congress standing up and publicly voting for more money. The media took great pleasure in these debates. Then lawmakers grew weary of taxpayers monitoring when they got a raise.

In 1989, lawmakers thought an automatic cost of living allowance would be great and inserted it the appropriations bill for the Treasury Department. No more pubic brouhaha. No more justification of how well Congress was doing its job. Leave such distasteful arguments to the little people.

Since COLA was enacted, lawmakers have taken raises seven times. The last one, in 2002, gave them a $5,000 boost.

This year, Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah brought up the pay raise for discussion and was soundly defeated. Considering this is a mid-term re-election year, I thought Congress might forego the raise to show it supports fiscal responsibility, possibly acknowledging the drastic budget cuts that the middle class and poor have endured at their hands, and demonstrate that everyone should make a sacrifice.

Boy, was I dreaming.

The 2.7 percent raise works out to $1.71 an hour, based on a 40-hour work week. But the impact of other congressional perks makes this raise greedy. I doubt anyone in Congress can say he or she lives on his or her salary alone, considering members of Congress are given allowances for their staff members, receive generous health and retirement benefits that never expire and housing allowances and other invisible bonuses that mainstream America will never hear about.

For the other recipients of COLAs, such as people on Social Security, civil servants and military personnel, COLA raises still don't make for a decent living wage. In fact, if you subtract the raise in Medicare premiums, the new Part D prescription medication program and the restructuring of qualifications for Medicaid, anyone receiving federal wages or benefits is worse off now than he or she was five years ago.

Then there is the federal minimum wage, frozen at $5.15 an hour. Today's minimum wage buys less than the minimum wage of 1968. If Congress applied the rules of COLA to the federal minimum wage, workers would be earning $7.50 an hour.

With cuts in entitlement programs, higher taxes for the working class and the poor and the danger of Medicare and Social Security programs going broke, a pay raise for Congress is another raspberry blown at the face of America.

Congress should be worried their COLAs will give the voters another reason to vote them out of office. Instead, they're taking the Alfred E. Neuman approach.

McKee, a wheelchair user, is an Albuquerque freelance writer and producer. You can e-mail her at chairgrrl@chairgrrl.com.