Times:

What will make this recession different, no matter how deep or shallow it is, is that it’s following an expansion in which most families received little or no raise. The median household made $50,200 last year, slightly less than the $50,600 that the equivalent household earned in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. That’s the first time on record that income failed to set a new record in an economic expansion.

Why has it happened? There is no single cause.

Oh, really?

Doesn't who's getting bailed out and who isn't offer a clue?

Medical costs have risen rapidly, which means that health insurance premiums take up a bigger chunk of workers’ paychecks than they used to. Some of this money goes to good use; it pays for treatments that weren’t available even a few years ago. But some of it, the part that disappears into the inefficient American health care system, is clearly wasted.

And in the last couple of years, the value of the typical worker’s benefits package has stopped growing. Since 2005, benefits packages have become slightly smaller, notes Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. So health benefits can’t come close to explaining the recent pay stagnation.

The bigger factors are probably some combination of the following: new technologies, global trade, slowing gains in educational attainment, the rise of single-parent families, the continued decline in unionization and the sharp increase in inequality, which has concentrated income gains at the top of the ladder. Your political views will probably determine the relative weights that you assign to those causes. Economic research hasn’t yet definitively answered the question.

No. It wouldn't.