Remember the Raise?

From the Washington Post courtesy of This is not a compliment:

Time was when wage increases tracked gains in productivity and profitability -- but that time is long gone. Since 2001 yearly productivity growth has averaged 4.1 percent, while wages and benefits have grown on average by just 1.5 percent. No longer does a rising tide, as John Kennedy famously pronounced, lift all boats. We are now in the 11th quarter of the current recovery.

Averaging all the recoveries from 1947 through 1982, at this point -- the 11th quarter -- private-sector wages and salaries had risen by 18.2 percent, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. By the 11th quarter of the Clinton recovery of the early '90s, however, wages and salaries had grown by just 7.4 percent. And in the current Bush recovery, they've increased by an anemic 4.5 percent. In the new American economy, rising tides don't raise boats; they swamp them.

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Rising tides being good for boats is the central premise on which virtually all moderate and conservative economic arguments are based. If that's no longer the case, and I'm pretty sure it's not, then, to riff on another cutesy economic slogan, what's good for Wall Street is most definitely not good for Main Street. "Free trade" is killing us. The only question is how bad it's going to get before the peasants take up their pitchforks and storm the Bastille. Hopefully, it won't get so bad before America comes to its senses. Hopefully.

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