A rotten deal, a rotting system...

The Business section of the times has an interesting take from Leonhardt on the lack of growth in the average family's income since 2000. Despite the years of growth since the last recession, the median income (adjusted for inflation) has dropped.

In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This point has been made many times over the past few years, but it is imperative that the body politic understand that the "growth" during the last economic expansion went to a rather small portion of the population. This type of economic expansion is rarely tolerated for long, and the current groundswell of populist anti-globalization sentiment can almost assuredly be grounded in the fact that a lot more Americans lost ground in the past seven years (in real terms) than in previous expansions.

So, what is to be done? I could blather on, but I'll quote at length instead:

But there is still a lack of strategic seriousness to the discussion, as Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution notes. After all, the United States spends a lot of money on education already but has still lost its standing as the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world. (South Korea and a couple of other countries have passed us, while Japan, Britain and Canada are close behind.)

The same goes for public works. Spending on physical infrastructure is at a 20-year high as a share of gross domestic product, but too much of the money is spent on the inefficient pet programs championed by individual members of Congress. Pork barrel spending does not add up to a national economic strategy.

Health care and taxes will have to be part of the discussion, too. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health pointed out to me that a serious effort to curtail wasteful medical spending would directly help workers. It would spare them from paying the insurance premiums and taxes that now cover that care.

The tax code, meanwhile, has become far more favorable to high-income workers at the same time that they — and they alone — have received large pretax raises. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?

It’s a pretty big to-do list. But it’s a pretty big problem. Since the economy now seems to be in recession, and since recessions inevitably bring their own pay cuts, my guess is that the problem will look even bigger by the time the next president takes office.

The likelihood of any of these areas receiving serious attention during the campaign season is slight, since there is no easy solution for the problems we have currently. There will be hard choices and invariably unintended consequences from those choices. These issues combined with the desire to spread some pork lovin and the pressure of interest groups will make any significant large step very difficult. The real hope lies in the everyday American setting their mind to the fact that we have to address these unsustainable policies, or we will be passing on a worse America to the next generation -- something no generation should ever hope to be remembered for.