For 25 years, each new peak in Wall Street paychecks set a new standard, which then rippled out all across the country as CEOs and other top managers began pointing to Wall Street salaries to justify increases in their own pay.

Consider ex-Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, whose government salary was just under $152,000 when he left office in July 1999. By October, Rubin had joined Citigroup and for three months of work in 1999 earned nearly $21.5 million. In an effort to minimize his role in the current financial troubles at Citigroup, Rubin has maintained that he didn't have operating responsibility at the firm. It is hard to imagine a better example than this of how out-of-control executive compensation has become: a high level executive making nearly $45,000 an hour claiming he's not responsible for the troubles his firm now faces!

Exploding executive pay trends explain in part why noted economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty find that the top 10 percent of U.S. families went from earning just over a third of all income in 1973 to earning just under half in 2006. According to the data, the share of income flowing to the top 10 percent in 2006 was the highest it has been since 1917. The more frightening fact is that the previous high was in 1928, the year before the great stock market crash of 1929.

In the wake of that crash, the federal government actually made things worse by neglecting to take steps to prevent the collapse of the banking system. Nearly a third of all banks in the United States failed.

Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, guided by history, is working to prevent bank failures. But there are more lessons from the Great Depression that our leaders should look to.

Measures were taken back then to raise the incomes of families on Main Street so the economy would never again spiral out of control because of rising joblessness and falling wages and consumption.

Perhaps the most important step, one that helped millions realize the American Dream, was a 1935 law strengthening workers' rights to join labor unions. American courts began to display a willingness to support these new rights.

And Congress took action to encourage middle-class consumption by passing the minimum wage law, Social Security and unemployment insurance.

Millions of Americans joined unions, giving them unprecedented bargaining power, which led to steady wage increases and fueled an explosion of productivity that supported higher incomes for all Americans, not just those at the top.

Then, in the 1970s, the war in Vietnam and the 1973 and 1979 oil price shocks introduced Americans to the dual misery of high inflation and rising unemployment.

The solution hatched by academics was that less government oversight of markets and less bargaining power for workers were needed to get the economy growing.

Growth did return, although not as rapid or as sustained as in the New Deal decades. More and more of the benefits of that growth flowed to the richest Americans. In Pennsylvania, from 2001 to 2005, the top 1 percent of families in the state captured a whopping 79 percent of the growth in income.

The time has come to rebalance the ledger and put more power in the hands of ordinary workers. A healthy economy is one in which we all prosper - not just those fortunate enough to work on Wall Street. *

Mark Price is a labor economist with the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg. KRC reports on the state economy are available at www.keystoneresearch.org.