The Economic Policy Institute delivers an annual analysis of the “State of Working America,” and this year’s version was released today. In their key findings, they lament the rise of “policy-driven inequality,” a condition that, even when the job market improves, leads to the bulk of our economic growth funneling up to the 1%, while those who can find work cannot get a decent wage.

It’s not like there aren’t possibilities for skilled labor to proliferate in America. I hear we have trillions of dollars in infrastructure needs over the next several years. Most of the associated jobs in that space pay decent wages. The public sector has been cut to the bone. Lots of mid-range jobs there. We need hundreds of thousands of new teachers. They need to be paid more money, as a teacher on stage at the Republican convention said (!) last night. We have an entirely new energy sector to stand up. Just boosting demand at all will bring back jobs like truck drivers and construction workers and real estate agents, all of which pay fairly well.

July 24, 2009, marks the last time the minimum wage was increased in America, to its current dollar amount of $7.25 an hour. At various times in their recent political lives, both candidates for President have called that figure too low. Now a group of activists have begun a quixotic quest to get the minimum wage increased, which would have a definitive economic impact on millions of Americans.

One of the long standing taboos in the US is an open discussion of our capitalist economic system. Mainstream economists talk of business cycles, recessions, depressions, upturns, downturns, etc, in an effort to avoid discussing just how unstable capitalism is. In 2009 that changed. Professor Richard D Wolff, a PhD who taught economics at UMass for many years, published a book entitled Capitalism Hits The Fan, a compilation of articles and essays written between 2005 and 2008. Since that time he has been on a whirlwind of personal appearances and radio/TV talk shows discussing just how capitalism has worked, or not worked, for people over the last 50 years.

It’s clear that something happened in corporate boardrooms around the 1970s and through to today, where they decided to give their CEOs massive amounts of money through salary and stock options. And why is that? Well, the fact that the top marginal tax rate had been cut in half, so more of that compensation would actually go to the individual, has to have something to do with that.

The last four years have seen a comeback in manufacturing. As that relates to the auto rescue, the Obama Administration never tires of telling the story. But one part of that story is often left out of the telling. Because it turns out that the expansion in manufacturing has accompanied flat wages (WSJ subscription required) for the sector, as worker salaries haven’t kept up with the rate of inflation.

It is an honor and a pleasure to have Paul Krugman at the Lake this afternoon for a conversation on End This Depression Now! Dedicated “To the unemployed, who deserve better,” the book is a condemnation of the policies and mind-set that have produced the worst economic depression since the 1930s. And unlike the Great Depression, which contemporaries did not understand, we know what to do; the current depression is entirely self-inflicted. The broken homes and ruined lives are not attributable to acts of God or the inscrutable logic of the market, but are the direct consequence of public decisions that have amplified the inherent risk of private credit by deregulating financial operations and the attempt to balance the budget when aggregate private demand is collapsing. The central message is that none of this suffering is necessary, and none of it is justified.

The implosion of Mike Daisey’s Foxconn stories may have, in the short term, returned focus to Apple’s suppliers of their electronic products. Now Foxconn, the notorious Chinese manufacturer, has announced a series of changes to working conditions at the plant.

I learned two useful things that are central to American life today, yet which I have never once heard stated on the radio or TV or read in a newspaper: I learned about the labor shortage that fueled the 150-year period of rising wages in the United States, and I learned about the fact that corporations used to pay a lot more in corporate taxes, especially as an overall percentage of American tax revenues, than they do now.

In many ways this is the best economic data since the beginning of the recession. The Labor Department reports that unit labor costs have risen above the level of inflation for the first time since the end of 2008. And much of that can be attributed to higher wages, according to the Wall Street Journal.