WASHINGTON
Here are some numbers you are unlikely to hear discussed in the current mad dash to the ''center'' in national politics. They come courtesy of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and form the ingredients for what needs to become a national preoccupation once the desultory presidential campaign is history.
Between the end of the 1970s, when double-digit inflation had the economy in a vise, and the mid-1990s, just before the current, unprecedented expansion began to accelerate significantly, the earnings of typical 25- to 34-year-olds who had never finished high school fell by nearly a third.
Over the same period the earnings of people who had graduated from four-year colleges shot up by a 133 percent.
Working full time, year-round, at the minimum wage with not a single day of vacation is a guarantee of abject poverty. You would earn just under $11,000, or $3,500 below the poverty line for a family of three, $6,300 below it for a family of four.
Women continue to take in just 73 cents for every dollar earned by a man. In terms of women of color, the figures are 63 percent for an African-American, 53 cents for a Latina.
The wage gap in terms of jobs of comparable worth is large and growing. It deprives the average women $4,200 in income annually, and the figure swells to $420,000 over a career. Wage inequality costs the US economy as well as victimized females some $200 billion a year. If pay equity existed, poverty rates in the United States would drop by more than half.
These numbers exist after a record-setting economic expansion. The fact is that the expansion hasn't begun to have an impact on the earnings of average working families, much less the poor. When Bill Clinton ran for president eight years ago, he declared full-time employment at poverty wages an enemy, but it has proved a durable one.
Kennedy in just the last week has twice zeroed in on what ought to be the outrage of low-wage employment, meaning that progressivism's most reliable leading indicator is once again moving to define what should be on the country's next page. The first instance was at his commencement appearance at Bentley College; the second was at a meeting here that brought together organizations as disparate as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the AFL-CIO, and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Kennedy's agenda is not radical. It starts with raising the minimum wage, a goal that still eludes a gridlocked Congress. It may be a familiar fight, but the fact remains that it is the quickest way to lift 10 million workers stuck at the bottom.
Investment in education and training is another way. Kennedy is backing the front lines of this struggle - the country's community colleges - as well as business-city partnerships and the public schools themselves. Anyone who can manage at least a couple of years schooling beyond high school is almost certain to end up above the median in income. And no progress will be made in these critical areas if precious resources are wasted on cutting the top rates of income tax; we can either indulge ourselves or address the country's unmet needs in a time of plenty. The fiscal resources do not exist to do both.
Recognizing that the best economic stimulus program would be to put a fair wage in the pockets of the women currently being denied one, Kennedy is pushing a long-overdue toughening of existing law to ban wage discrimination affecting workers in equivalent jobs in the same workplace and a toughening of remedies for women denied equal pay.
Kennedy also asserts that the landmark Family and Medical Leave Act of seven years ago needs to be nudged beyond its present guarantees of unpaid leave. He thinks it's time for responsibly managed paid leave.
Kennedy notes that several states are already studying or acting, including New Hampshire and Vermont, where the state Senate recently passed legislation allowing its citizens to collect unemployment compensation during parental leave; a similar initiative has been introduced in Massachusetts.
The monster gap that remains is health insurance. As Kennedy has noted, lack of it is now the seventh-ranking ''and most preventable'' of all causes of death in the United States.
Like Al Gore, Kennedy is a committed incrementalist, but there are signs that he is beginning to think about a blueprint for national health insurance that would include all the interim steps that need to be taken to reach it.
Most of the Massachusetts political world is focused on the ballot access soap opera of a possible opponent to Kennedy this fall or on elevating the state's Libertarian Party to a status it has never earned from the voters.
As usual, it's more interesting to focus on what Kennedy himself is thinking and doing, because it always has far more relevance to the state's working families.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
