One slate that the New Year won’t come close to wiping clean is the one with the lessons of Hurricane Katrina scrawled all over it. Too bad the entity that needs to pay attention is as dense as the floodwaters that inundated New Orleans three months ago.

I’m talking about a Congress that has, for the past eight years, refused to raise the federal minimum wage.

In a way, that’s not so surprising. The Marie Antoinette mentality ushered in by President George W. Bush rules; it believes that the wealthy ought to be entrusted with more wealth via tax breaks and the like, and that the poor ought to be admonished to make do with any crumbs that the rich might toss their way. This is, after all, the administration that has perfected scare phrases such as class warfare to demean anyone who dares speak out about economic inequality in a country in which the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay at large companies stood at 431 to 1 in 2004, and workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour only earn 55 percent of what it takes for a family of four to live at the federal poverty line.

But then, Katrina blew through town -- and exposed the problems of what happens when people are forced to live on wages that only allow them to survive rather than thrive.

The people who were holed up at the Louisiana Superdome -- the vast majority of whom were black and concentrated in the low-paying, service jobs that prop up the New Orleans economy -- found that the means they used to survive in the city in spite of less-than-livable wages didn’t work in a hurricane. They couldn’t rely on the public transportation they had used to get to work and home to get them out of the city -- and out of harm’s way. They had no savings accounts to scavenge to get a hotel room, and no insurance to cover the loss of whatever personal belongings that might have been lost in a storm.

So they were hemmed in by more than just a hurricane.

Yet that horrific scene -- as well as the suffering that still continues -- makes me think about how many of those workers who were caught in the storm could have avoided their fate if they made enough money to afford a decent car and some semblance of a savings. It made me think of how things such as natural disasters have a tendency to expand the list of basic necessities in life beyond food, housing and health care. Now the list includes personal transportation and emergency savings.

But it was unlikely that many of the people trapped in the Superdome would have been able to afford those things on $5.15 an hour. And sadly enough, that didn’t have to be the case.

In 2002, under the leadership of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, voters in New Orleans voted to raise the minimum wage to $6.15 an hour. But the Louisiana legislature subsequently voided the law by banning municipalities from establishing their own wage laws.

The ravages of Katrina ought to be enough to get that state’s legislature to change that law -- or to establish a higher statewide minimum wage. Or if that isn’t persuasive enough, what’s happening in other states ought to be.

According to a recent story in The New York Times, 17 states and the District of Columbia have set minimum wages that exceed the federal rate, and this year, lawmakers in dozens of other states will debate the issue.

That’s good. But Congress ought to be embarrassed that things have come to this -- because what it says is that they are more in step with business interests and out of step with the needs of the people.

Now I’ve heard many arguments against raising the minimum wage. While I have some empathy for the small businesses who worry about it, I believe that they’d be better off pushing for alternatives like, say, a sub-minimum wage for teenagers who are likely to still be living at home, rather than fighting a wage increase.

Yet having said that, I believe it is way past time for Congress to increase the minimum wage -- especially since there will always be lawmakers in states such as Louisiana that are more paranoid about creeping socialism than concerned about vivid poverty. I also believe it absolutely unconscionable for anyone to work full-time, and yet have to go down to the food stamp office in order to eat.

Besides that, as service jobs replace higher-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States, there ought to be some guarantee that the people who wind up in those jobs won’t be forced into poverty -- or that average taxpayers won’t have to pick up the tab for social costs that could be avoided if the same businesses that heap lavish rewards on their CEO’s simply paid their workers enough money to live on.

That’s why it’s high time that minimum wage workers had a raise. And if the low-wage poverty that Katrina exposed isn’t enough to drive home that lesson, I cringe to think what will.