The Boom Was a Bust For Ordinary People – Barbara Ehrenreich:

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial . . . innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.
[...]
Not that we hadn’t been warned. A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, like Wal-Mart, too many of our employers today haven’t figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits.
[...]
But you can’t jump-start a car that lacks a working battery. We need less titillating talk about “stimulus” and more commitment to some fundamental repairs — higher wages, a real safety net and a return to progressive taxation among them. The challenge isn’t just to prop up stock prices but to rebuild an economy in which everyone shares the good times — and no one is consigned to a permanent recession.

Ehrenreich does a nice job of summarizing the pain that the working class has been in for the last several years. That’s going to intensify and likely spread up the income ladder pretty soon. Lost in all the reporting about the housing bubble is that it took people losing their houses before the administration and Congress decided to do something and produced a “stimulus” bill in less than two weeks. But in the years before when poverty was on the rise along with the ranks of the uninsured, nothing happened. That says a lot about what this country has become.