The Great Bush Boom
Straight white male business types love people to fall in line, never question, and never complain. They claim to be the levelheaded voices of practicality - the men who live in the real world and keep things running.

I spent years in the business world. I can say from first hand experience that this golf-set speak always sounds like it's coming from a place of frantic delusion. It's usually from men that are sure they're in that magical top one percent of earners. I'm glad I'm not the only one calling BS on all of it.

The Times:
Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity
With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.
Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.
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.

ThinkProgress:
Uninsured Up, Real Wages Down for Men and Women
– In 2005, 46.6 million people were without health insurance coverage, up from 45.3 million people in 2004.
– The percentage of people without health insurance coverage increased from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent in 2005.
– For full-tim, year round workers, the median earnings of men declined 1.8 percent to $41,386, and the median earnings of women declined 1.3 percent to $31,858.
– In 2005, 37.0 million people were in poverty, not statistically different from 2004.

The Big Picture:
Moving the Goalposts: Fugly NFP
- The mix of job growth remains skewed toward low-paying industries;
- Weakness is most evident in the retail component -- which has stopped growing;
- Almost one-half of the rise occurred in the health and social assistance category -- generally low-paying jobs;
- Other sectors have not picked up the slack (Joshua Shapiro, MFR);
- The pace of job creation has slowed dramatically.
2004: 175,000/mo2005: 165,000/mo2006: 140,000/moPast five months: 119,000/mo (Steven A. Wood, Insight Economics)
- Manufacturing has lost more than three million jobs since 2000; Conditions remain poor;
- Prior recoveries at this point had created two million manufacturing jobs;- Unemployment fell to 4.7 from 4.8% due to a large number of adults leaving the labor force (NiLF);
- The two-tiered labor market continues: The top quartile has it good; but for everyone else, the future is worrisome;
- For many workers, real incomes lag inflation; (Peter Morici, Univ. of Maryland)
- Total labor input is growing very sluggishly in Q3, foreshadowing the continued softness in economic growth. (Steven A. Wood, Insight Economics)
- The average work week is dropping (by 0.1 hours to 33.8 hours), even as productivity slows.

It's clear that the Bush tax cuts aren't helping average Americans. CEO's and other executives have it made. They are not going to let go of their free ride until they've seen every dirty trick they know fail.