Buried in the coverage of the Big Three "bailout" is the larger story of the role the decade-old assault on middle class wages has played in this expanding economic meltdown.

In exchange for a $17.4 billion cash infusion, the Bush administration's "lifeline" would seem to exact concessions from all of the auto industry's major stakeholders: the UAW, management and shareholders. Predictably, however, it is union givebacks that have garnered the most attention. It would seem that union wages, along with the health and pension benefits guaranteed current and retired workers, make American car companies uncompetitive.

Nonsense.

It's true that benefits provided to current and retired workers -- expenses that are largely socialized in other industrial nations -- do add materially to the cost of employing an American auto worker. But peel away legacy costs and benefits, and a UAW worker earns around $60,000 per year. That compares to about $52,000 in non-union plants. 

For DeMint, Shelby and the rest of the Republican ideologues who have chosen this issue and this time to go union-busting, $60,000 per year is simply too much to pay a full-time American worker who makes cars for a living. Yet they seem quite comfortable with outsized executive compensation that grants Rick Waggoner of GM $9.3 million in total compensation. This is nearly ten times what Toyota pays its CEO, Hiroshi Okuda, even though GM has been losing market share to Toyota for years.

Back when the Bush administration announced its "economic stimulus plan," I did a thumbnail analysis of the economic impact that would come from raising the average wage paid to Wal*Mart workers. By my totally unscientific, unlearned calculation, increasing hourly wages from the current $9.68 ($17,000 per year at 34 non-benefit-eligible hours) to $16 per hour would produce $15.6 billion dollars in direct economic stimulus -- over $45 billion at a 3/1 multiple. Sure, it would have reduced Wal*Mart profit by $547 million, or 6 pecent. But shareholders willing to pay CEO Lee Scott $17 million ought to suck it up and take one for the team, right?

Yeah, right.

Our decade-long experiment in wealth concentration has been a disgusting failure. We ask workers to be more productive, yet willingly reward executives with compensation far in excess of the value they contribute to their organizations or the economy. When confronted with the reality that wage stagnation and cost-shifting was creating an expanding class of working poor, politicians answered with the Ownership Society. They papered over the problem with stated-income mortgages, home equity loans and credit cards. Now debt is over 100 percent of disposable income. The chickens have come home to roost.

Squeezing more work out of fewer employees is hardly a prescription for a sustainable American economy. Creating jobs that provide security and a living wage is a start. We should make a down payment on that effort by convincing the Neanderthals on Capitol Hill to save their union-busting vitriol for a time when workers don't need unions to protect their standard of living.