As the media spotlight on presidential politics turned from Denver to St. Paul, and as a powerful hurricane churned toward a fearful New Orleans, newspapers tucked inside more bad news about the economy. This Labor Day weekend, lower wages and higher prices for essentials like fuel and food are the hard facts facing working families.

Personal incomes plunged in July. It was the biggest monthly drop in three years, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. Consumer spending slowed significantly as the impact of billions of dollars in government rebate checks began to fade.

In Vermont, the median household income dropped to $50,423, a 4.7 percent decline in two years that was the second-steepest in the country, according to the Census Bureau report out earlier in the week.

Nationwide, the new census data on poverty, income and health insurance painted a bleak picture of the American economy in 2007. Mind you, that was a year before the housing market collapsed and energy prices skyrocketed.

In the last seven years, the vast majority of Americans' incomes are down, more families are going without health insurance, and millions more are living in poverty.

Median household income for the nation decreased 0.6 percent so far this decade. It went from an inflation-adjusted $50,557 in 2000 to $50,233 in 2007. The number of Americans living in poverty increased by nearly 5.7 million since 2000 and the poverty rate has risen more than a full percentage point since 2000. The poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent, increasing slightly from its level of 12.3 percent in 2006. Today, 37.3 million Americans are living in poverty. The number of people without health insurance increased by 18.8 percent. The total number of uninsured dipped slightly last year, but that was mainly due to increases in government coverage.

To give the president his due, the Bush decade has been a very good one for a very small sliver of the population. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute agreed with Senator Bernie Sanders that the income gap hasn't been so wide since the Great Depression, The Nation reported online. Bernstein said the concentration of wealth in the richest 1 percent of Americans is greater than at any time since 1928, and while the economy expanded in the 2000s, that growth clearly failed to reach most households.

"Never before has poverty been higher and median income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic expansion than at the beginning," added Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

So have a good Labor Day, but remember the saying: ''Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize.''