US: Education no escape from stagnant wages

By way of preface, the report notes that the past 25 years have seen an increase in non-farm business productivity of 67.4 percent, while over the same period “median weekly earnings of full-time workers rose from $613 to $705, a gain of only 14 percent.” Conversely, 80 percent of all income gains reported on federal tax returns between 1980 and 2005 went to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, with this group’s share of total annual income more than doubling during the past 25 years.

The most significant feature of American economic life over the past quarter century, and of the first years of the new millennium in particular, has been the polarization between the super-rich and everyone else. But the official representatives of capitalism have sought to couch the enrichment of a tiny elite in terms of a differentiation of skilled and unskilled workers.

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