Last month's economic news has been far from encouraging for most Americans, with a continuation of an uneven and unpredictable job market, rising consumer prices, and declining earnings. Yet, despite the grim realities faced by most working families in the U.S. the recovery period has been very good to business, with corporate profits up over 15 percent since it began. A survey of indicators shows the Bush administration's economic policies, specifically how they value profits for corporations over the bottom line for average Americans, have further eroded the country's economic health. The reality that the economic recovery is not helping most American households to recover is beginning to be acknowledged by the Bush administration. Earlier in August, Secretary of the Treasury John Snow conceded the slowly progressing economic recovery has not benefited all Americans equally. Snow said, "[Now] the idea...is to explore the things that produce broad-based prosperity and one of the things we know is that less educated people have seen their incomes and wages grow more slowly." But the unbalance in the recovery has been caused by more than just a poorly educated workforce. Snow's comments came amid the release of two reports that put this recovery period in historical context. In early August, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report that compares our current economic recovery with previous recovery periods dating back to World War II and finds that, not only is this one less robust, it is much more unevenly distributed, with corporate profits reaping nearly all the benefits at the exclusion of the labor market. In fact, corporate profits are the only major economic indicator that has outpaced the post-World War II average during this recovery, and they have grown twice as fast as during the recovery in the early 1990s. The second report, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) background paper, examines employment during and after the economic recession of 2001. CBO found similar trends in the labor market with wages and employment suffering during the recovery, while corporate profits soared. Among its many interesting findings, the CBO writes, "both the magnitude and persistence of the decline in the labor force [participation rate] during the past several years are unprecedented." CBO has reported elsewhere on the unbalanced distribution of economic gains during the recovery period, speculating that one explanation for the unforeseen increases in federal revenues this year is increasing personal income concentrated among high-income taxpayers. High-income taxpayers generally pay tax at higher rates, thus bringing in more revenue to the Treasury. As Americans continue to be apprehensive about the economy, more negative indications have come with the release of economic data from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The data indicate a significant rise of consumer prices in July (by 0.5 percent), driven largely by rising energy and food costs, in particular record high oil prices. In a separate release, BLS also reported workers' earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined by 0.2 percent in July. This is a distressing combination as many Americans continue to struggle with mounting personal debt, living paycheck-to-paycheck with very little personal savings. These households will experience a more severe financial squeeze, as they are forced to pay more to put food on their tables, fill their gas tanks, and heat and cool their homes with less money. Most troubling of the bad news is the economy continues to fall short in creating a sufficient number of jobs to keep pace with population growth. Although July saw a healthy rise in hiring from previous months, adding 207,000 jobs, the average number of jobs added each month for 2005 is only 191,000. This is well below the jobs necessary to keep up with new workers entering the labor market. Therefore Americans are currently facing higher prices for essential goods, while holding lower paying jobs and having an ever shrinking number of options with an increasingly flooded labor market. As evidence mounts of the failure of Bush administration economic policies to our economy growing strong for all Americans, the need for an about-face on these policies becomes increasingly clear.