The American economy remains mired in what likely is a massive transformation that is fast leaving workers behind. As Floyd Norris writes today in his Off the Charts column,
AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.
The rest of the column explains some changes in the way income and gross domestic product are calculated, but the point is pretty clear. We are not in the midst of a magical economic rebound.
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Hank Kalet 
It is not just a coincidence that tax cuts for the rich have preceded both the 1929 and 2007 depressions. The Revenue acts of 1926 and 1928 worked exactly as the Republican Congresses that pushed them through promised. The dramatic reductions in taxes on the upper income brackets and estates of the wealthy did indeed result in increases in savings and investment. However, overinvestment (by 1929 there were over 600 automobile manufacturing companies in the USA) caused the depression that made the rich, and most everyone else, ultimately much poorer. Since 1969 there has been a tremendous shift in the tax burdens away from the rich on onto the middle class. Corporate income tax receipts, whose incidence falls entirely on the owners of corporations, were 4% of GDP then and are now less than 1%. During that same period, payroll tax rates as percent of GDP have increased dramatically. The overinvestment problem caused by the reduction in taxes on the wealthy is exacerbated by the increased tax burden on the middle class. While overinvestment creates more factories, housing and shopping centers; higher payroll taxes reduces the purchasing power of middle-class consumers…\”http://seekingalpha.com/article/1543642-a-depression-with-benefits-the-macro-case-for-mreits
Where the hell are they supposedly overinvesting? China, Mexico, Viet Nam, India? The big problem of the great recession (depression) of 2007-2008 was the bursting of the housing bubble, all kinds of hedge fund chicanery, credit default swaps gone wild and outright malfeasance by the banks and investment houses. In other words, criminality was the problem, was the cause of this huge recession. We need to have the reenactment of the Glass Steagall act, just for starters and throwing some of these banksters in jail, after a fair trial, of course.
Another huge reason that workers are falling behind is the all-out nuclear war against unions in this country. We have one political party that is absolutely and totally anti-union and has as one of its main missions the destruction of unions in this country. The Democrats or rather too many Democrats pay weak lip service to unions but don't give much support to unions when the rubber hits the road. Mostly GOP governors have declared war on public sector unions; they have turned their states into right to work (for less) states and have taken away the bargaining rights of unions. The overall unionization rate is 11.3% and it is a pathetic 6.9% for the private sector. Canada's unionization rate was 31.9% in 2012 and they don't have the equivalent of right to work provinces in Canada. Germany has about twice our unionization rate, there is no war on unions in Germany and wages are not dropping. Some other countries with good economies and amazing unionization rates: Denmark- about 75%, Sweden – about 75%, Finland – well above 80%.