Today’s New York Times brings with it an all too familiar and increasingly grim message: the share of the nation’s GNP that goes to working men and women continues to decline despite a reasonable five year economic recovery. Eduardo Porter citing a Bureau of Economic Analysis study, reports that, “ [sic] the economic slice [received by workers], including wages, health insurance and pension benefits, declined 2.5 percentage points from 2000 to 2005, to 56.5 percent of gross domestic product.” What explains this development? Economists cite a number of factors including the declining proportion of the economy’s output derived from manufacturing versus finance industries.

Thirty years ago manufacturing contributed 27 percent of national output and financial services 18 percent. Today the numbers have flipped with finance responsible for 27 percent versus 22 percent for manufacturing. The consequences of this are fewer jobs in manufacturing and, because of the higher level of capital employed in finance there are fewer jobs in this sector. That the finance sector generally pays lower wages than manufacturing (except for management jobs) and provides fewer jobs helps explain the smaller share of GNP going to workers in the form of wages and benefits. Add to this economic transformation other factors such as a higher proportion of US consumption satisfied by imports, a ridiculously low minimum wage, and a decrease in the percent of the labor force protected by union contracts, and you get a smaller share of national wealth going to working men and women.

Porter’s analysis points out that the US continues to diverge from other developed countries where inequality is been more consciously watched and debated. Measures of poverty and the level of the minimum wage are far more realistic in Europe where they are linked with the cost of living and are based on relative standards of living. In the US both the minimum wage and the poverty rate are completely out of sync with the cost of living in America. No country in Europe pays $5.15 an hour for work or uses an absolute measure of poverty to determine who is poor and who is not. Don’t forget to add that in most countries in Europe, access to health care is a right not a privilege.

The myth of unbridled opportunity in America is increasingly in question. Recent research reported in the journal “Future of Children” jointly published by the Brookings Institution and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, indicates that with the exception of a select groups of immigrants, economic mobility is out of reach of all but a few Americans. Women and children and people of color are particularly disadvantaged.

Election debates have soured and little attention is being focused on the conditions facing America’s working men, women, and children. This doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. Indeed, all it means is that poverty, rising inequality, and economic insecurity make poor copy compared with philandering politicians, corporate board room paranoia, and plain old greed.