Benefits don't translate as directly to consumer spending. If my company pays more for my health insurance, that doesn't affect my ability to pay off my mortgage or purchase electronics. If I get more vacation days, that means I do less work, but the money I get remains constant. Certainly, there are some benefits that do translate to economy-stimulating actions (such as subsidized purchases or memberships), but I'm under the (possibly misguided) impression that a large portion of the increase in benefits is just health insurance costing more.

Paying more for health insurance does affect your ability to pay off your mortgage and purchase electronics - when you get slammed with an enormous unexpected medical bill, and don't have to route mortgage & electronics money into the staying alive fund. Trust me.

This argument doesn't really apply if the cost of the service increases by 5-10% annually but the service stays the same, as has been the case for health insurance in the United States.

actually the service gets WORSE

There are multiple problems with this chart:

1. It looks like it tracks the average compensation, which is easily skewed by a few high income earners whose wages grew disproportionately (investment bankers, lawyers).

2. It doesn't say anything about the hours worked. Even when hourly compensation is up, total income can be down if the number of hours worked goes down.

A better analysis: http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compens...

Taking the median has problems just as serious. A better analysis is: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/middle-class, demonstrating that the real story may not be so bad for the middle class. As for hours worked, this graph suggests that the value rises and falls with recessions: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...

Can you compare that against the increase in the standard of living, college, housing, vehicle, and food costs? This by itself doesn't mean anything if everything else is increasing in costs faster than the increase in wages...

The graph purports to do that comparison by measuring in inflation adjusted dollars.

In reality, since inflation tends to be overstated, real wages have probably grown by even more than the graph indicates.

Maybe, maybe not. It could very well be that the argument is talking about the median situation, whereas the chart shows a mean.

For median, I would recommend this article: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/middle-class