I agree with you that we could be doing a lot better. However, at least in my area I am definitely seeing recovery starting to occur. They are actually starting to build housing developments for the first time in 4 years. The unemployment rate went from about 15% to about 9%. Wages are still not rising, but I think this is part of the bigger issue with globalization. The us and other western countries are going to have a harder time growing because labor is just cheaper in developing countries. People like talking about china's growth, but Latin America is experiencing nearly the same growth. In order for American workers to compete, they are going to have to get higher education in a degree that is actually going to be needed in the future. A lot of the manufacturing jobs we lost are not coming back and those that do are usually going to states where labor cost is cheaper. People who used to have these jobs in manufacturing are going to have to get retrained in something that is needed, or they get stuck doing a job that pays significantly less. This is probably a main reason wages are going down.
One issue that is more unique to the us is the high price of health care. If you take into account healthcare costs you could say that wages actually increased for jobs that had health insurance during the last decade. It' simple, if your employees healthcare costs increase 3% each year, can you afford giving your employees good raise? You are also less likely to hire more people. While obamacare fixes some issues with our healthcare system, it does very little when it comes to costs. Until we fix this issue we are not going to get waiges increasing significantly for the middle class.
