Well, yes, you are. There is plenty of blame to go around about that, but there are, as usual, conflicting opinions.

Some would have you believe that your income taxes are too high. Others, that you need to be retrained in a high paying profession. Still others, that unions have destroyed the labor market and caused employers to flee the country.

According to data from the Treasury Department, your taxes are the lowest they have been since 1957. They peaked during the Reagan years, at about 12% for a median family, and settled down under Clinton to about 8%. Bush has lowered them another 1%. So, your taxes are not even as high as your parents were.

As far as retraining goes, there are more people doing that right now than you can count. When they are finished, they will get new jobs. These jobs will pay about what you are making now, or less. But at least you might be have a job, until it is outsourced.

The fact is that retraining has meant high technology, computers or biotech. Both of these professions are being outsourced to India as fast as they can be. Don’t waste your time. Then retrain as what? Nobody knows, and that makes it a little tough to choose a path.

Yep, unions have bled American companies dry. That is probably why we have the strongest economy and the largest market in the world. Oh wait, that doesn’t make any sense. If unions are bad for an economy and its workers, shouldn’t there be a major industrial nation in the world, that is much better off than we are, that has no unions and never did? Nuts, I can’t think of one. If you are thinking of China, you need to remember that China is a communist country. Well, how about the other China, Taiwan? Unfortunately, they are socialist, with huge government industries in key sectors.

You might have heard it said that unions created the American middle class. They did. And, the American middle class is what drives our domestic economy. The larger it is, the more business we do, the more jobs there are and the more money we are paid.. How did unions create the middle class? By raising wages. If you think about it, high wages are the signal feature of the most successful economies. Aren’t they? Oh yeah, China again. Well I have to remind you that they are selling to us, not the other way around. If their people made as much as we do, we would be selling to them and there would be no trade deficit.

In 1967 only 47% of married women worked outside the home. Now the number is 67%. This statistic alone casts doubt on the notion that wage increases have outpaced inflation. In 1967 the second income was largely committed to savings. Now, it is largely committed to living expenses. Most families are so strapped that the loss of the second income for more than 3 months will have serious consequences to family finances. We are talking about foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Yet your taxes are lower than they have been in a very long time. There are more options in education and specialization than there have ever been and people have trained and retrained two and three times in a lifetime now. Unions are not the problem, they have less participation and less power now than at any time in the last century. So why aren’t things getting better?

You are broke because that is the way your boss wants you to be. There is no force, none, operating in the employment picture that is as consistent and powerful an influence on wages as the antithetical relationship of labor to management. When Unions were in power, they gained ground for you. Now they are out of power, you are losing ground, from the bottom of the wage scale through the middle class and into the minor executive level, losing ground.

You have heard of the widening gap between rich and poor. The driving force behind this is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few that has resulted from the systemic dismantling of American corporations. American corporations no longer distinguish between profit growth resulting from growth in business revenues and profit growth resulting from cost cutting. When costs are cut, the resulting increase in profits goes into the pockets of investors and executives. They can show growth when there is none. Investors reinvest in the companies in the expectation that they will continue to grow. In order to do so, they must further cut costs. This cycle has led from mergers and acquisitions in the eighties to downsizing and rightsizing in the nineties to it’s current and probably final chapter is outsourcing and globalization. You are left in the dust.