Corporate Profits Are Soaring, But You're Not Feeling It

Corporations may be raking in record profits, but workers aren't getting any richer, new data illustrates.

In fact, real wages have declined by nearly seven percent in the past seven years, according to data collected by the compensation research company Payscale. In other words, U.S. workers have less buying power now than they did before the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, corporate profits have increased by 18.6 percent over the past year, according to Payscale. In fact, corporate earnings now represent a larger share of GDP than during any other period in history.

Payscale's findings are just the latest in a slew of research that indicates the sluggish economic recovery has not been beneficial for most of us. Income inequality in the U.S. is at a new high as skyrocketing income gains for the top one percent are met by stagnating wages for practically everyone else. In 2012, an average CEO of one of the nation's largest companies was paid 273 times more than his or her workers, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

Unfortunately, Payscale predicts that wage growth will continue to slow. The firm said that U.S. wages would only increase 0.8 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2013, less than one half of the 1.7 percent growth experienced in the third quarter.