So long as you're already feeling disgruntled on the job
Over the past decade, the failure of the economy to raise wages has become undeniable. Until recently, both corporate profits and the nation's productivity -- to which economists have traditionally linked wages -- have risen strongly. Although the value of corporate benefits such as health care have risen somewhat faster, the median full-time worker's wage still amounts to some $38,000 a year, only marginally higher than it was in 2001. Median family income is about $1,000 lower than it was then.
This situation may now be getting more attention, but it is not new to the 2000s. The real wages and salaries of the median full-time male worker in his thirties with a high school diploma are down steeply from levels reached at the beginning of the 1970s. But even those with college degrees have not fared especially well. For example, for men between twenty-five and thirty-four with college degrees, median earnings, according to Census Bureau data, are up only marginally, by about 3 percent. For women of the same age and education, median earnings have risen more rapidly, by about 20 percent, but this is an annual rate of gain of only 0.5 percent. And despite the increase, women working full-time with similar educations still make only about three quarters of what men with similar educations earn. Family incomes have risen modestly over this period largely because spouses work many more hours.
-- From the NY Review of Books' assessment of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker
You can read the first chapter of the book here, or the NYT review on May 28, 08. The review's ending is worth attention:
[T]he components of an efficient social safety net are reasonably well understood. For instance, we could easily afford a single-payer health system like the one in France, which covers everyone and delivers better health care for about half the amount we now spend per capita. We could easily afford to supplement the American Social Security system, which transfers income from workers to retirees, by establishing a national retirement savings plan in which a portion of each worker’s wages was deposited in a tax-sheltered investment account, enabling families to take full advantage of the miracle of compound interest. We have ample resources to supplement lagging wages by raising the Earned Income Tax Credit, which Ronald Reagan called the most effective antipoverty program ever devised by Congress. And we could easily reduce the college-tuition burden on low-income families by expanding the existing program of Pell Grants.
Skeptics invariably counter that the taxes needed to pay for an expanded social safety net would cripple the economy by weakening people’s incentives to work hard and take risks. Yet there are many ways to raise additional tax revenue that would actually cause G.D.P. to grow rather than shrink. A tax on carbon and other environmental pollutants, for example, would raise substantial revenue and yield a cleaner, more sustainable environment. Congestion taxes would save millions of hours currently wasted in traffic jams. A progressive income tax that exempts savings would divert billions of dollars from wasteful mine-is-bigger spending contests.
I may have to get over my needlework store aversion to make a sampler: No economic system can prosper in the long run if people who work hard
and play by the rules cannot meet their basic needs.
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