Approaching the Labor Day weekend, there is not much good news out there for working Americans. Incomes are down since 1999, 5.9 percent nationally and in some states more than 10 percent. Poverty rates held steady, which means 37 million Americans still fall below the poverty line. So much for the recent economic recovery touted by President Bush. Reported in the New York Times, “among the poor, 43 percent were living below half the poverty line in 2005 — $7,800 for a family of three. That’s the highest percentage of people in “deep poverty” since the government started keeping track of those numbers in 1975.” Things are simply getting worst for many more people and in very serious ways.

A sign of underlying economic weakness is the percentage of the population covered by health insurance which rose to 46.6 million, an increase of 1.3 million since 2004. Despite state policies to fill the breech of employer-based health care, 1.6 million more children are unprotected. Families, children and working adults are making less income and enjoying fewer protections today.

Growing income inequality is setting new records. Persons in the top 20 percent of the population earn 19 times more than persons in the bottom 20 percent of the population. The New York Times rightly points out that growth alone is an insufficient indicator of national well-being. Like the mean of a statistical distribution, focusing on growth provides no sense of who is benefiting from economic change. Indeed, interviewed in the New York Times, Bob Greenstein, executive director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, shows that the average person living below the poverty line actually earned $3200 less in 2005 compared with the previous year. Obscured by these figures are much worse circumstances for many Americans. On this weekend celebrating the laboring classes, it is difficult to see any rewards from hard work. What ever happened to the “American Dream?”