Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and is a public policy professor and analyst, says in his latest commentary that not only is unemployment too high, but also, hourly wages are dropping and there continues to be wage disparity between the very rich and the middle and lower economic classes:
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"...hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent....
Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing....
We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.
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Read the entire article,
The Root of Economic Fragility and Economic Anger for an expansion of the ideas presented above. Reich thinks that Obama and the rest of the Capital Hill politicians are not doing the public a favor by pretending that we can "get over" this bump in the economy.