where do you work? fortune 500 corporate jobs are shedding pension, health care, and retiree benefits as fast as they can. read some of the recent news on IBM settlements in the pension lawsuits against them - that's just the tip of the iceberg.
the problem with these wage statistics is that they include compensation for those at the top - and are therefore skewed.
show me some wage statistics with those making over $250K eliminated, then we will talk. When Oracle offshores 1000 engineers making $75K per year to India, and turns around and gives 25 executives bonuses in the same amount, the wage statistic appears flat for that company - the statistic does not capture what has truly happened.
You describe a nation so badly off that there must be millions of former industrial workers out there starving to death, begging for food on the streets. Somehow it hasn't happened.
Aside, if management loots a company, that is the business of the shareholders, who should forbid large bonuses of that kind. It's not my problem unless I own their stock, and it's certainly not the government's problem.
The bottom line is that it's not the government's job to make sure that the economy works or that standards of living increase--although they definitely have, at least by material standards. It's the government's job to create conditions where people can do business without violence.
In reality, anything you do to benefit one industry artificially will harm another--just witness the effect of the steel tariffs on the auto industry. Everything has unintended consequences. You would have the government pick winners and losers in the economy--a planned socialist economy.