I don’t know or recognize my country anymore. I know that 43 million of us now live beneath the poverty line and 25 percent or 16 million of our kids do also. I also know there are just 3 million jobs open to these folks that some insist upon calling “too lazy to look for work” or “bums grown dependent on government handouts.”

I know that we are a country where some have everything imaginable and even that is not apparently enough. I know that over all the years from 2000 to 2009 real wages of working Americans rose a total of 4.5 percent while during the worst years of the Great Depression from 1929-39 they rose 5 percent. I also know that from 2000 to 2009 the number of Americans billionaires grew by more than 200, or more than doubled. I further know that some will angrily accuse me of “class warfare” for simply reporting these facts.

I also know that one of our richest men, Warren Buffet, has said that the class war in America has already been fought and the very rich “have won.” I know politicians of all kinds have claimed that the American worker is the most productive in all of the world and the “steel backbone” of the country (John McCain), but at the same time I see more and more of those American working families dropping beneath the poverty line because they earn $22,000 a year or less. I understand that someone earning just that much these days could not possibly “save for retirement.” Certainly not with a decent family health insurance that pays for much of anything. At the same time, I know that the largest, richest companies are paying their CEOS an average of $9.6 million a year and, according to Bloomberg Reports in 2009, the top 50 Minnesotan CEOs earned from about $1 million at the bottom to just under $200 million at the top.

I guess I know enough about cause and effect to understand there is some link between great wealth and growing poverty. I know from watching television occasionally that we are still an economy based largely upon rampant and conspicuous consumption but that for 20 years now spending very much for the average American family meant debt and too often too much debt. I know that we now hear how all of us have to “sacrifice” and “tighten our bets” to reduce the deficit “for the good of the country” while at the same time we must evidently extend a huge tax cut of over $800 billion a year for mostly the wealthiest that was passed with the promise to sunset that cut in 2010. It was a tax cut predicated on the supposition that it would cause a magnificent trickle down and lead to halcyon economic times and many, many more good-paying jobs. And I know astonishingly just the opposite effects happened and that state and even federal budget agreements have been stalled because the same idea that taxing those with the most of everything would be bad economic policy.

I consider Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, the greatest American president. He said, and I paraphrase, that America was a great country because it had a government for, of and by the people. I don’t think Honest Abe would know and recognize his country anymore either.

Greg Van Hee

Perham