Good paying jobs drastically decline in U.S.

The economy is booming for a very small percentage of the population:

A new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that the number of good jobs - jobs that pay at least $17 an hour, and provide health insurance and a pension -- declined by 3.5 million between 2000 and 2006. Using comparable periods from the 1980s and 1990s, CEPR Senior Economist John Schmitt shows how this economic recovery has been significantly worse than previous ones.

Schmitt finds the driving force behind the decline in the share of good jobs in the 2000s is the sharp deterioration in employer-provided health insurance (down 3.1 percentage points) and employer-sponsored pension and retirement-savings plans (down 4.9 percentage points).