this is only part of the story. business earnings are swelled by quantitative easing and federal deficit spending, both of which devalue the dollars workers receive for their labor. meanwhile, the cpi grossly understates the true rate of inflation for working people; their inflation-adjusted wages are shrinking even faster than stated. consider also a harvard business school study of rental-housing affordability in 20 medium-sized cities for the period 2001-2009 which found that rents were static or up slightly, while median wages fell by about 15%: this reflects the fact that when a worker earning "legacy" wages loses his/her job, he/she rehires at the new, much lower prevailing wage. thus, even with the recent, election-year improvement in employment figures, many of these rehires are working for less than they did five or 10 years ago. needless to say, gov't remedies -- tax cuts, stimulus spending and extended benefits -- are not sustainable and only add to the workers' debt to foreign creditors while depreciating the value of their wages. and corporate profits remain dead money -- they aren't generating many new jobs because of the ongoing impoverishment of the people who constitute the demand side of the supply-demand equation. ... the picture is much worse than people seem to realize.