Biden explained his task force this way:
Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families. Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.
How will he know if working families are growing and prospering? All we measure nowadays is how Wall Street is fairing. The status of the Dow appears in newspapers every day. Expressed crudely, when the Dow rises we have prosperity, when it falls we have recession. Sure, there are other measures but most of them are related to the world of investment and finance.
Why all this emphasis on Las-Vegas finance? Why not on workers? Does not the vast majority of our population consist of people working for a living? Shouldn't the most important measure of prosperity be concerned with workers?
There is one measure of how workers are doing: the unemployment rate. It's hard to call this a measure of worker prosperity, however. It's more a measure of the difficulties workers have in obtaining jobs. It gives us no idea of what workers are getting paid and what benefits they have.
I think a good measuare of how workers - and the country at large - are doing is the median worker income, which consists of median wages and the value of median benefits. For greater clarity we may break down these values in terms of different industries. These values should be posted by newspapers on a regular basis.
The median worker income would also give us a good measure of how business is doing. High worker income implies that businesses are doing well enough to pay their workers well. When workers do well they feed the entire economy and financial people do well too.
An argument can be made that worker income is a better measure of prosperity than the Dow. Main-Street indexes tell us more about the state of the entire economy than Wall-Street indexes
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