Imagine if the typical top 20 percentile family earned $272,000/yr –instead of the average income of top 20 percentile families being $272,000/yr.

(The Census says $186,000/yr but its family numbers add up to only 67% growth over 40 years while per capita income grew 100%. If family income grew 90% — the difference hidden by top coding income above one million — that would add an extra $86,000 to the top quintile average.)

Wouldn’t just about everybody but Newt Grinchrich agree that the labor of our imaginary top 20 percentile families was not worth that much more than the labor of bottom 20 percentile families ($16,000/yr, not counting food stamps and other helps). Top 20 percentiler’s are not rocket scientists by and large (even if they were!).

That all the excess income (income shift) has been traced to top 3 percentile pockets, overwhelmingly to the top 1 percentile, most especially to the top .1 percentile does not make the situation any less bizarre. CEOs, news anchors and ball players making 25 times what their predecessors did is possibly more extremely out of line with economic common sense…

…creating the necessity to do what we should have done all along – what we would have to do even if a “fairy godmother” wave a magic wand and reset income distribution between the oceans and below the Canadian border to 1973 specs to prevent the income slippage from happening all over again: set up a system of sector-wide labor agreements and institute the highest practicable minimum wage…

…not the (wont even save super market workers from the race to the bottom induced two-tier contracts) card check left-over and not the slow stepped minimum wage increases that will end up a dollar below 1968 by 2011.

Right now we have indispensable last-lot seller (business) vs. desperate fire-sale sellers (labor) – what existed at the beginning of industrialization. What American labor desperately needs to do is set up is indispensable last-lot vs. indispensable last lot to assure fair bargaining – then, let the market take care of itself.

Major means wage labor, especially low wage, gets a lot more money: a doubling of the minimum wage and sector-wide labor agreements (the latter being the world-wide accepted answer to the race to the bottom – when 2050 China has the same living standard we do today, they will undoubtedly use sector-wide labor agreements).

Nobody in the intellectual elite (whose intellectual blood I absorb as much as a leech can) seems to appreciate the giant scale of the wage raises needed, especially on the bottom, to close the standard of living gap with the rest of the modern OECD – nor how little that giant scale would cost, especially at the bottom (a strange triage).

Doubling the minimum wage* would add only 3% inflation (to the cost of GDP output) while shifting about $400 billion of income to bottom 40 percentile earners. [*doubling to 1/2 of the average wage – average calculated as all non-investment private income divided by 140 million workers X 2000 hours – not the gov average which only grew 20% while per capita income grew 100% since 1968 -- Ike’s and LBJ’s were 2/3, which was really pushing back when the average wage was only 40-50% of today’s, not much headroom.]

Anything less than a 1/2 the average wage minimum, anything less than sector-wide labor agreements and American labor only gets marginal relief from a real Great Wage Depression. Do something “great” (not just “good”) to relieve something great.