Remember what you've been told: Progressive taxation is bad. Unions are bad. Raising the minimum wage is bad. Democrats are bad. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good. Globalization is good. Republican policies are good for the economy....

Workers face paycheck pinch

After inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.

...By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.

It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.

... the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.

"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. ...

Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school.....

In [a Bureau of Labor Statistics] survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.

... on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003....

--Christian Science Monitor

Remember: For seventeen of the past twenty-five years, the president has been Republican. For six of the remaining eight years, the House and Senate were Republican. The entire federal government is Republican now. And the Republican Party claims to be the party of ordinary people.