In the last stretch before the election, the White House is trumpeting its economic record and lamenting the fact that the press isn’t singing their tune.  FoxNews.com faithfully picked up the story, though.   Quoting Press Secretary Tony Snow:  “People are feeling good about the economy. And if you take a look at the news coverage of it, it's been overwhelmingly negative at a time when you do have just an extraordinary situation."  The article cites the fact that “real wages for American workers [have grown] — 2.2 percent last year.”  (See the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release.)

Sure enough, other media outlets have reported a less rosy picture. ...

For example, in this week’s Time magazine, Kathleen Kingsbury writes that, “According to Department of Labor statistics, salaries rose 3% from June 2005 to June 2006, but inflation rose 4.7% and health care 8%.”  (Check for yourself.  According to BLS, the real average weekly earnings for this June to June period rose by .1 percent)  The main gist of the Kinbsbury article is that health care premiums are causing wages to be further depressed.  “Health-care costs rise more than 60% in the past five years” and “39% of companies offer no medical benefits, up from 31% in 2000.”  Most of those companies that do offer benefits are planning to cut coverage.

In August, the New York Times ran a handy chart showing that in the years since 2001 (the beginning of the Bush term), wages have slid, as a proportion of GDP, to their lowest levels since 1947.  Meanwhile corporate profits have risen in this same period to near record highs. 

The moral of this story:  The market distributes wealth in its own way -- and that way changes over time, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.