From the point of view of an economist at a think tank that examines the trends and policies of working people in the U.S., the reasons are simple: “Wealth is in their housing and what they get paid,” explained Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.

“They don’t have a lot of dividends,” he continued. “Their wealth is … not in financial assets.”

The decline of union membership has been a key driver of income inequality in recent decades, a new report found.

The drop in unionization accounts for roughly a third of the growth in wage inequality among men and a fifth among women between 1973 and 2007, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

The share of the workforce represented by unions declined from 26.7% in 1973 to 13.1% in 2011. This contributed to the increase in inequality by lowering wages for middle class workers, according to EPI.

Declining unionization is responsible for about one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men from 1973 to 2007, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The wage gap between white- and blue-collar workers grew some 10 percentage points from 1978 to 2011, while the gap between college and high school graduates increased 24 percentage points.

Nationally, the share of the work force represented by unions declined from 26.7 percent in 1973 to 13.1 percent in 2011.

“Unions reduce wage inequalities because they raise wages more at the bottom and in the middle of the wage scale than at the top,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute, said in a statement. “It is unsurprising that efforts to weaken unions have exacerbated both wage inequality and the divergence between overall productivity and the compensation of the typical worker.”

Real wages have stagnated over the last decade partly because of dwindling collective bargaining power, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute.

In his research for the institute’s “State of Working America” report, which will be published Sept. 11, Lawrence Mishel said “deunionization” also can explain some of the growing wage gap between the nation’s highest paid workers and everyone else.

About 13.1 percent of the U.S. workforce was represented by unions last year. The share has decreased steadily since the late 1970s.

“The decline of unions has affected middle-wage men more than any other group and explains about three-fourths of the expanded wage gap between white- and blue-collar men and over a fifth of the expanded wage gap between high school and college-educated men from 1978 to 2011,” Mishel wrote.

Nearly one-third of the increase in wage inequality among men over the last four decades is attributable to the declining unionization of the American workforce, a new study from the Economic Policy Institute found. Declining unionization is responsible for roughly one-fifth of the growth in wage inequality among women over the same time period (from 1973 to 2007), according to the report. In 1973, 26.7 percent of American workers were in a union; by 2011, that number had fallen to 13.1 percent. The study also found that declining unionization was responsible for 76 percent of the increase in wage inequality between white- and blue-collar workers.

Imports to the U.S. from China have risen dramatically in the past 10 years. According to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, that increase contributed heavily to job losses in Wisconsin, but the trend may be slowing.

Between 2001 and 2010, Wisconsin lost more than 54,000 manufacturing jobs to China. Rob Scott is the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research for the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute. He blames a growing trade deficit with China for many of the manufacturing industry’s economic woes.

Men and women who have completed college face a dilemma, according to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. Yes, they’re faring better in the current economy than others. But they still might lag behind another key comparison point: themselves.

According to Mishel’s data, college graduates have lost income during the past decade. From 2000 to 2011, for instance, median weekly earnings fell by 1.2 percent among people who earned a college degree. From 2007 to 2011 alone, it dropped 1.1 percent. “I don’t think they’re necessarily rebounding any better, from what I see,” he said. “What’s happened over the last 10 years—wages for college graduates and those with high-school degrees—neither groups has seen any improvement in their wages and benefits.”

Social Security remains most boomers’ hope for retirement income. On average, U.S. workers are beginning to take their Social Security benefits at age 63.8. That average fell by more than five years between 1945 and 1970. After that, though, the average has stayed fairly stable, noted Monique Morrissey, an economist who wrote “The Myth of Early Retirement” last year.

But Morrissey cautions against measuring “retirement” by Social Security take-up rates alone. Forty-five percent of eligible Social Security households continue to earn money from a job or jobs.

It’s a fact of life, though, that about one in three people becomes disabled before retirement.

The economy now is “a little bit better,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But if you lost your job, there just wasn’t that much available.”

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning economic think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that America. lost 2.7 million jobs as a result of the U.S.-China trade deficit between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million of them in manufacturing. Wages of American workers have also suffered due to the competition with cheap Chinese labor, EPI says. A typical two-earner household loses around $2,500 per year from this dynamic.

“They have been managing their economy on the back of ours for more than a decade,” says Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at EPI and the author of the report. China imports materials from the U.S., he says, to make cheap exports that it then sells back to U.S. consumers.

It’s a fantasy, of course. Not coincidentally, as union density in America has declined, so too have workers’ wages, benefits, workplace protections and negotiating power. Additionally, as the Economic Policy Institute documents, unions not only help their own members, they set industry-wide standards. So when unions lose ground, all workers lose out.

A $295 billion trade deficit with China resulted in the loss of 2.7 million U.S. jobs in the past decade, with the biggest impact in California’s Silicon Valley, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.

“In an ideal world, you can’t cut government spending effectively until the economy is close to full employment,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst for the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The magnitude of government spending cuts for a balanced budget amendment is beyond the realm of the tenable. We don’t have a $1 trillion waste, fraud and abuse account to tap into.”

But not all college grads have it equally rosy. As the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews has pointed out, the Georgetown report misleadingly sandwiches together plain-old bachelor’s holders with workers who have a master’s, doctorate, or professional degree. And according to data Matthews cites from the Economic Policy Institute, between 2007 and 2011, 98.3 percent of the job gains in that combined group went to the advanced degree holders. These days, it seems we’re really in a grad school economy.

That reality plays out pretty clearly in the unemployment figures, as shown in this chart posted by EPI’s Lawrence Mishel. Bachelor’s holders, like everyone else, have suffered from much worse joblessness than normal during the recovery. Today, they’re still facing 4.1 percent unemployment, well above pre-recession levels. If there was a great shortage of college talent in the labor market, it’s reasonable to assume their situation would have improved faster.

The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%.  But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income.   Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome).

Bogira ties this back into residential segregation, an ongoing interest of his (and mine). On that note, Richard Rothstein and Mark Santow have a long piece in The American Prospect about residential segregation, and in particular its history in Detroit and George Romney’s attempts to combat it.

When Larry Mishel and I looked at this in the context of wage inequality, we found no statistical evidence for acceleration, so we found it hard to blame technological change, something that’s literally been going on forever, as the cause of something new — increasing wage inequality.

George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that the U.S. and the U.K. are two nations divided by a common language. While the two countries are indeed worlds apart in many ways, the issue of high unemployment among recent college graduates looms large on both sides of the Atlantic.

Both countries present increasingly tough labor markets for recent graduates: in the U.S., data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, show that the unemployment rate for young college graduates was 9.4% in 2012. In the U.K., that figure was 9% between 2010 and 2011, the latest data show, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

What does that mean in the real world? I think it’s mostly a longwinded way of emphasizing that incomes and prices are two sides of the same coin. The political discussion normally talks about income and wages in one box, and then college affordability or health care or housing in some other boxes.

The improvement is visible in a number of statistics. The July labor force participation rate for these workers—that is, the share either with a job or looking for a job—was 60.5 percent, up from last summer’s record-low 59.5 percent. And the summer youth unemployment rate is also on the decline, from 19.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted) in July 2010 to 18.1 percent last year to 17.1 percent this year.

“It’s all good news. It’s headed in the right direction,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Prosperity Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington. However, she adds that figures on labor force participation and employment for young workers “are still really low.”

The Tax Policy Center, the Congressional Budget Office, the Economic Policy Institute, Annenberg, Brookings, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, your own brain and common sense logic – they all fact checked Romney’s plan and agree that his jobs numbers don’t bear out and his plan results in a tax increase for the middle class on a revenue neutral budget.

If the legislation becomes law, it will give more than a half-million low-wage workers a pay increase and could generate 4,500 new jobs because of increased economic activity, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute:

Increasing Massachusetts’s minimum wage to $10.00 on January 1, 2013, would give a raise to more than 581,000 of the state’s lowest-paid workers.

“People who have been knocking on doors for two years will turn to something else when there are no payroll jobs in their field,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “The growth we’re seeing is in fields where you can create those opportunities.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Ryan’s plan would mean 1.3 million fewer jobs next year than otherwise, and 2.8 million fewer the year after.

Setting a higher federal minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that supports the needs of low and middle-income workers, would boost the income of 651,000 New Yorkers and generate $618 million more in consumer spending at NYC-based businesses.

Luckily, data from the forthcoming Economic Policy Institute book “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” which EPI generously provided to Wonkblog, does separate the groups, and the results are informative. While those with only a BA did much, much better than people with a high school degree or only some college, they still saw job stagnation during the recession. The only group that continued to gain jobs were those with advanced degrees:

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that, while raising the minimum wage to the proposed $9.80 level would have a significant impact on about 28 million low-income workers, it would especially benefit women. As the report puts it, the fact that “women comprise 54.5 percent of workers who would be affected by a potential minimum-wage increase makes it a women’s issue”:

A different study by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that tax code provisions relating to executive pay enabled about 8,000 U.S. public companies to lower their corporate tax bill by $30.4 billion between 2007 and 2010.

Those assets are worth between $300,000 and $700,000. That means the Ryans’ net worth is greater than 80 percent of Americans from their natural-resource investments alone, according to inflation-adjusted data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Their combined assets are as high as $7.6 million, likely putting the Ryans among the top 5 percent of Americans in terms of net worth.

The unlimited tax deductibility of executive pay loophole operates as a powerful subsidy for excessive compensation. The more corporations pay out in executive compensation, the less they owe in taxes. And average taxpayers wind up paying the bill. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this loophole cost American taxpayers as much as $9.7 billion in 2010.