A week ago the Labor Department reported that September wages and salaries for U.S. workers, adjusted for inflation, plunged almost 2 percent compared with a year previously.
It was the second-worst showing in at least eight years.
Sure, last summer's energy-price surge made results look especially bad. Gas and oil costs have plunged since then, representing one of the few pro-consumer developments of the economic implosion.
The larger point is that worker pay is in the dumper.
Inflation-adjusted wages and salaries have been falling for years. (Total pay is up because increasingly pricey, employer-paid health insurance is counted as part of compensation. But you can't make a down payment on a Chevy with your medical plan.)
In the 1990s, stock market profits helped consumers make up for miserable pay. In the 2000s, soaring house prices served the same purpose. But stocks are back at 1997 levels. The home-equity ATM has been junked.
Consumers are more heavily indebted than ever. And they're beginning to lose jobs in herds.
Yesterday's economic reports may even understate the distress. Many analysts suspect the Labor Department of lowballing recent job destruction. The unemployment rate doesn't count millions who want to work but are not looking anymore because of poor prospects.
In any case, the U.S. economy has a poor record of emerging from downturns.
Remember the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s? Employment growth after the 2001 recession was among the worst on record. We're probably looking at more of the same after this recession officially ends.
The first chapter in the crisis manager's textbook is about scrapping conventional wisdom.
That's why you bring in a new guy, to explore approaches that once seemed radical.
Taxes can't go much lower in an Obama administration. Neither can interest rates. But it looks like the third anti-recession weapon - government spending to employ people and aid the jobless - is about to exceed anything that once seemed prudent.
If Obama doesn't get the country back on fiscal track after this crisis resolves, we're in trouble.
But given the magnitude of the problems and the size of the package already handed to Wall Street, temporarily overdosing on consumer medicine is the only move he has.
