Blue Texan has already covered the political idiocy of David Brooks’ post-Caucus column.

I’d like to talk about his sociology.

Those of you who follow Mr. Brooks already know that he has a smooth line in explaining how The Little People think, based, I have to guess, on a conversation he would have had with the guy who empties his wastepaper basket at work if he actually talked to people who make less money than he does.

Even given that, it’s hard to figure out how he came up with this

Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

Um.

Isn’t that special.

In the world outside of the wingnut welfare circuit, this is how people who don’t have high-paying jobs live their lives

The cost of affordable rental housing has risen 28 percent in the past seven years, far outpacing the wages of those who need it most, according to a new report released Tuesday.

"Out of Reach," the annual report of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), found that housing affordability is most difficult for minimum-wage earners but is also tough for those who earned the median hourly wage ($14.57) last year.

In 2006, what the NLIHC calls the "national housing wage" rose to $16.31 for a two-bedroom rental, from $15.78 last year. That is the hourly wage required to afford the rent and utilities of a modest market-rate rental home without having to spend more than 30 percent of one’s gross income, a commonly accepted measure of housing affordability.

Housing is least affordable for minimum-wage earners, even those working in states that have higher minimum-wage levels than the federal minimum, which has been $5.15 an hour since 1997. Even proposals to raise that minimum to $7.25 would narrow but not close the affordability gap.

The report found that a minimum-wage earner making $10,712 a year cannot afford a one-bedroom home based on fair market rents anywhere in the country. To do that, he or she would need to earn at least $28,475, NLIHC calculated. And two-bedroom homes are out of reach even for families with two minimum-wage earners making $21,424 annually. For that, they’d need to make $33,925.

"Every year it is becoming more difficult for low-income families to find decent homes they can afford," said NLIHC president Sheila Crowley in a statement. "As we approach the holiday season with its intense focus on consumer spending, Out of Reach shows the difficulty that millions of low-income families face to even pay for their homes."

and clearly american workers don’t have reason to be concerned about it

Progressives aren’t alone in worrying about the widening income gap these days. Even Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke expresses concern. Much of the focus has been on the massive increase in compensation for jobs at the very top of the income distribution. The flip side of this story—the growth of the low-wage labor market and the deteriorating conditions of those jobs—often gets less attention.

It’s time to give it a lot more. In "Understanding the Low-Wage Labor Market in the United States," our new report co-authored with Heather Boushey and Rachel Gragg, we find that more than 40 million jobs pay low wages—about one in three.

We approach this work with a theory: A big income gap is bad for our economy and our democracy.

What is low-wage work? There is no universally accepted definition. One commonly used formula defines a low-wage job as one in which a full-time, year-round worker earns less than the federal poverty threshold ($20,444 in 2006 for a family of four, or $9.83 an hour).

Plenty of people agree that the federal poverty line is outdated and has limited appeal for describing low-wage work in today’s economy. Moreover, using a measure of basic needs to define low-wage work quickly turns into a dispiriting debate about "how minimum the minimum should be."

To avoid these problems, we adopt a new definition of low-wage work—one that takes inequality into account and uses what we dub a social-inclusion approach. Under this definition, a low-wage job is one that pays substantially less than a job held by a typical male worker. The median wage for men in the United States in 2006 was $16.66 an hour; jobs paying less than two-thirds of the median wage for men paid $11.11 or less per hour.

Some 44 million workers—about one of every three—hold low-wage jobs paying less than $11.11.

That is bad news, and worse than most people realize. Clouding the picture further, most low-wage jobs don’t offer employment benefits like paid sick days, health insurance, or retirement accounts. They also tend to have inflexible or unpredictable scheduling requirements, and provide little opportunity for career advancement.

Compensation for these jobs has been getting worse relative to other jobs. Over the last quarter century (1979 to 2005), wages of workers in the top third increased by 22 percent, while low-wage workers ended up at roughly the same place where they began. In 1979, the typical low-wage worker earned $8.47 per hour—26 years later, that worker earned a mere six cents more in real dollars.

And how are the people outside the US who are getting those jobs that were previously paying a living wage here making out?

She came home from the auto parts plant feeling faint, the burden of being six months’ pregnant and working an eight-hour shift on her feet with only a half-hour off for lunch.

She wondered what would happen if she didn’t take care of herself, but said her main concern was keeping her $55-a-week job at the Johnson Controls plant, regardless that she is paid nearly 40 percent less than those working beside her.

"It is very little. But I have to support my son," said the small, almost birdlike woman in her 30s who asked that her name not be used out of fear she’d lose her job.

She is just a lowly "temporary worker" at the bottom of Mexico’s auto parts industry. Such workers are growing in number as the country’s parts makers struggle to reduce costs to remain competitive.

Not so long ago, Mexico floated along as a low-cost producer to the auto parts world. But now its niche is threatened by global rivals who can trump it with lower salaries or superior quality and productivity. As a result, Mexican auto parts firms keep pressing to trim costs, and Mexican workers find themselves working longer, harder and sometimes for less pay.

It’s a mirror of the process that plunged some U.S. auto parts firms into bankruptcy and that wiped out 200,000 auto parts jobs in the United States in the past seven years – nearly a fifth of the nation’s auto parts industry.

Mexico’s auto parts companies are being challenged from almost every direction.

Chinese companies are quickly siphoning away auto parts work that would have been done not so long ago in Mexico.

but why wouldn’t David Brooks be concerned about these issues, even if his fictional working class subjects aren’t?

From 1990 to 2002, the lowest-paid 10 percent of the work force saw their hourly wages rise 18 percent. Those workers didn’t see their wages truly begin to rise until around 1997, when the economy picked up.

Over the same period, the highest-paid 10 percent enjoyed a bigger bump: a 49 percent raise. (All wages have been adjusted for inflation.)

The disparity is perhaps more obvious in our federal tax brackets.

In 1992, Washington was home to only 19,500 individuals and families making $200,000 or more in income, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Combined, those making less than $30,000 a year reported billions of dollars more in income than all those at the top.

Ten years later, the population in the $200,000-and-above bracket swelled to 51,000 and made $10 billion more in income than all 1.3 million taxpayers in the lowest two brackets.

So maybe the little people care a little more about wages than you might think, Mr. Brooks.

You inutterable epicene preening schmuck.

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