With all eyes in Washington focused on the debt ceiling debate, little has been made of another costly impasse. Republicans have refused to re-authorize the Federal Aviation Administration without including an anti-union measure in the deal, leaving the FAA in the midst of a costly 10-day shutdown that has forced it to furlough more than 4,000 workers nationwide.

Now, with Congressional leaders seemingly close to ending their fight over the debt ceiling, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced today that the House will begin its August recess after it votes on the debt deal later today. That means the FAA shutdown, which began July 22, will likely last at least another month.

Democrats on the House Transportation Committee are outraged, as Reps. Nick Rahall (D-WV) and Jerry Costello (D-IL) called the recess “irresponsible” and said they planned to write a letter to Cantor calling on him to keep the House in session until the FAA was re-authorized.

Meanwhile, the FAA’s airport inspectors keep doing their jobs, even without pay:

The administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration says airport safety inspectors nationwide are working without pay and shouldering travel expenses themselves, as the agency’s budget crisis enters a second week. [...]

An inspector may travel to five airports in a two-week period, racking up thousands of dollars in hotel and airline tickets. Babbitt says they’re being asked to put those expenses on personal credit cards.

The government is losing more than $200 million a week in revenue generated through ticket taxes during the shutdown, and $2.5 billion in airport infrastructure improvement projects are on hold. The airlines, meanwhile, have used those tax breaks to line their own pockets rather than pass the savings on to customers.The Senate is reportedly staying in session to work on a re-authorization plan.

As ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang has reported, a handful of right-wing front groups and billionaires have engineered a political consensus that trumpets reducing U.S. debt rather than tackling unemployment. But unfortunately, these front groups have had some assistance from the mainstream media outlets who seem obsessed with covering deficit reduction and debt debates in Washington, while ignoring the other problems plaguing the economy as it recovers from the Great Recession.

For instance, a ThinkProgress media analysis of the coverage of three major cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, and Fox — over the last week finds that these outlets gave a much larger portion of their coverage to U.S. debt rather than the unemployed. ThinkProgress scanned media coverage at these outlets for the words “unemployed,” “unemployment,” and “debt.” The first two phrases put together still got 15 times less coverage than the debt. ThinkProgress has assembled this data in the following chart:

Of course, it makes sense that the media dedicated time to the debt ceiling debate last week, as the U.S. was inching closer and closer to an unprecedented default on its obligations. However, by failing to cover the other problems in the economy — continued high unemployment, mounting foreclosures, and record corporate profits that are not translating into job creation — the media does a disservice to those who are struggling with a slew of economic problems that have nothing to do with the federal budget or congressional negotiations.

And while the mainstream press has obsessed over U.S. debt, the American people appear to have different priorities. A Gallup poll taken last month finds that only 16 percent of Americans see the federal budget deficit as the “most important problem facing the country.” Meanwhile, 27 percent of American see “unemployment/jobs” as that problem, while 31 percent name the “economy in general” as that concern.

Deunionization is worsening the income inequality gap, accounting for nearly a third and a fifth of wage inequality among men and women, respectively. According to a study by Bruce Western of Harvard University, data proves “the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market“:

“From 1973 to 2007, wage inequality in the private sector increased by more than 40 percent among men, and by about 50 percent among women. [...] deunionization—the decline in the percentage of the labor force that is unionized—and educational stratification each explain about 33 percent of the rise in within-group wage inequality among men. Among women, deunionization explains about 20 percent of the increase in wage inequality, whereas education explains more than 40 percent.

Part of the reason for this gender discrepancy is that men have experienced a much larger decline in private sector union membership—from 34 percent in 1973 to 8 percent in 2007—than women (who went from 16 percent to 6 percent during the same period).”

Even nonunion workers benefit from stronger unions as employers raise wages and increase employee benefits. The study also attributes the changing normative perception of pay equity to the decline of unions, arguing that “unions helped institutionalize norms of equity.”

Tellingly, the decreasing rate of unionization clearly parallels the squeeze on middle-class incomes. See the trend in this chart:

Since the union movement began to stumble in the 1970s, the link between worker productivity and wages has been severed, leading employees to work harder for less and less money. In between 1980 and 2008, “nationwide worker productivity grew by 75.0 percent, while workers’ inflation-adjusted average wages increased by only 22.6 percent.” Today unionized workers make about $2.50 more per hour than their nonunionized counterparts.

But whereas unions may contribute to increased wages and benefits, a harsh legal environment and negative public perception are keeping unionization rates low.

– Sarah Bufkin

The White House and congressional leaders last night struck a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, agreeing to cut $1 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, create a special committee to find another $1.5 trillion in cuts, and instituting “triggers” that will lead to automatic cuts if the committee can’t come to an agreement. “Now, this process has been messy; it’s taken far too long. I’ve been concerned about the impact that it has had on business confidence and consumer confidence and the economy as a whole over the last month,” said President Obama during a brief address last night. “Nevertheless, ultimately, the leaders of both parties have found their way toward compromise.”

But left out of the equation thus far is what impact those sorts of cuts will have on an economy struggling to recover from the Great Recession. Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of the bond investment firm Pimco, said yesterday that the deal will weaken the already fragile economy:

The potential budget agreement “does nothing to restore household and corporate confidence. So unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise, growth will be lower than it would be otherwise, and inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.” [...] “We have a very weak economy, so withdrawing more spending at this stage will make it even weaker,” El-Erian said.

El-Erian added in an interview with Bloomberg, “When you look at the debt burden, there is a numerator and a denominator. We may end up creating so much damage to the denominator, which is growth of GDP, that what we do in the numerator, reducing the debt, may end up being insufficient.” This conclusion was also made by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who noted today that the deal “will damage an already depressed economy“:

Slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

The House and the Senate could both vote on the debt ceiling deal today. While its possible that the special committee could look at revenue increases, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has already vowed to appoint Republicans to the commission who will vote against any sort of new revenue.