Throughout the country, businesses grappling with declining fortunes are cutting hours for those on their payrolls. Self-employed people are suffering a drop in demand for their services, like music lessons, catering and management consulting. Growing numbers of people are settling for part-time work out of a failure to secure a full-time position.

The gradual erosion of the paycheck has become a stealth force driving the American economic downturn. Most of the attention has focused on the loss of jobs and the risk of layoffs. But the less-noticeable shrinking of hours and pay for millions of workers around the country appears to be a bigger contributor to the decline, which has already spread from housing and finance to other important areas of the economy.

While official unemployment has risen only modestly, to 5.1 percent, the reduction of wages and working hours for those still employed has become a primary cause of distress, pushing many more Americans into a downward spiral, economists say.

Moreover, this slippage is a critical indicator that the nation may well be on the verge of a recession, if not already in one.

[Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/business/18hours.html?ref=todayspaper “Read the Article”) (New York Times)

For the first time since 1980, when long lines sprouted at gasoline stations, Americans are beginning to cut down on their driving.

The slight decline in total miles driven – apparent first in December – may indicate that the twin forces of high gasoline prices and a struggling economy are starting to affect the US lifestyle. Surveys find that Americans now consider gasoline prices a “financial hardship.”

If Americans are still balking at prices at the pump by Memorial Day, the effect on the economy may be wider – ranging from how people take vacations to how many trips to the mall they make.

[Read](http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0402/p01s05-usec.html “Read the Article”) (Christian Science Monitor)

In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did.

More than anything else — more than even the war in Iraq — the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that was released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.

Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.

[Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09leonhardt.html?_r=1&ex=1365480000&en=626d7623b055c755&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin “Read the Article”) (New York Times)

As more families are forced from their homes, the fallout is painfully clear at animal shelters nationwide.

In Dayton, Ohio, where foreclosures are up 50 percent from last year, every shelter in the city is overrun.

Mark Kumpf, director of Dayton’s Montgomery County Animal Resource Center said the pets are suffering as a result of the foreclosure crisis, describing these animals as the “second class of victims in the national economy.”

[Read and/or Watch](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/RealtyCheck/story?id=4446021&page=1 “Read and/or Watch”) (ABC News)