Yesterday the New York Times featured a front page article about the growing disparity between real wages and worker productivity. (The Times also editorialized about “Falling Paycheck” in today’s paper.)

The article said that:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

According to Jonathan’s calculations, the minimum wage would be around $19 an hour if wages had kept pace with productivity over the past thirty years.

The piece also highlighted the fact that:

At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.
…
In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners — a group that includes many chief executives — received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data.

These trends, which are gradually decimating the middle-class, are not only unsustainable for our long-term consumer-based economy, but also dangerous for our political system where wealth correlates so closely with political power.