As we've highlighted in the past, the US hasn't just been shedding jobs.  Median wages have gone down as well.  David Cay Johnston illustrates this in his Reuters column today:

Johnston writes:

In 2010 total wages and salaries came to $6,009,831,055,912.11.

That's a bit more than $6 trillion. Adjusted for inflation, that is less than each of the previous four years and almost identical to 2005, when the U.S. population was 4.2 percent smaller.

While median pay -- the halfway point on the salary ladder declined, average pay rose because of continuing increases at the top. Average pay was $39,959 last year, up $46 -- or less than a buck a week -- compared with 2009. Average pay peaked in 2007 at $40,764, which is $15 a week more than average weekly wage income in 2010.

The number of workers making $1 million or more rose to almost 94,000 from 78,000 in 2009. However, that was still below some earlier years, including 2007, when more than 110,000 workers made more than $1 million each. At the very top, the number of workers making more than $50 million rose in 2010 to 81, up from 72 the year before. But average pay in this group declined $4.5 million to $79.6 million.

Read First look at US pay data, it’s awful here.