If, according to the WSJ article you linked to, 44% of Americans think we're still in a recession, it may reflect their perception based on their own circumstance.

The same article says that "household income" in the US is up 4.1%. It fails to note whether this percentage is a mean or a median. If it's a mean, well, it only takes a few very high numbers to shove the entire average up, but that's cold comfort for the many whose numbers may be static, or even falling.

I didn't want to comment on this until I found the study itself somewhere, but in its absence, please note Bob Herbert's 5 April 2004 op-ed piece in the NYT, "We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money?". The study upon which he comments is titled "The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003", from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Some pertinent quotes from the op-ed piece:

Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: "This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent."

The study said: "In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation."

In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners.

The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001.

If the workers are producing more, they should receive more of a reward for their hard work than should the investors whose hard work was to call their stockbrokers. If it weren't for the workers, there would be nothing worth investing in.

I also invite comment on the other articles to which there are links here, the "Concentration of Wealth Gallery".

You may say that looking out for the workers is not the government's job, and if I could see that anyone else was looking out for them -- um, us -- I would agree. But unless there's a big comeback among the unions and unionization of previously nonunionized workers (i.e., workers looking out for themselves), I don't see anyone except government in a position to look out for the workers. And government appears to be in capital's pocket.

It's hard not to notice the economy, Tom. Everyone goes to the grocery store every week.