The great divide

The folks at NASA go to great lengths to get photos of barren and lifeless places. They should know they don't need to send a rover all the way to Mars for that. Instead, they should just stop by and photograph the walls at la casa de los Okerlund.

Curious what these walls look like? Close your eyes. See that? That's them.

In one month I will have lived in the same house for 10 years. In that time I have bought one picture to put on the walls.

I'm no ascetic. I like art. I like landscapes. I like portraits. I like French impressionists and Watertown native Terry Redlin. I even like those pictures of dogs playing poker. You know the ones – where the bulldog is smoking a cigar while slipping the ace of spades under the table to his bulldog buddy.

Hilarious.

Even Mona Lisa cracked up at that, I bet.

Maple sugar is the color of my living room walls. So says the lid of the paint can that now sits in the basement. Honestly, I don't mind the color, but stare at the walls long enough and you start to feel like you're floating in a gravy boat.

The walls definitely need more pictures, and I'd definitely like to purchase more pictures. But I don't have the money. So I can't – and so I don't.

Four Sioux Falls City Council members voted 12 days ago to increase the city sales tax to raise money to build roads. Four voted against the increase. Mayor Dave Munson had to break the tie.

He voted in favor of the higher tax.

It is the slightest of increases: an additional eight cents on every $100 spent on goods in the city. Yet the heat it drew was red-hot. Granted, there are people who will oppose a tax increase no matter the reason and no matter how small. Years ago these people were called good conservatives. But the protesters of this tax increase possessed a different motivation. They appeared to be of two kinds: Either they were struggling to make ends meet. Or they knew someone who was.

For them their opposition was personal as opposed to philosophical, and their vehemence suggests something important about the fortunes of a significant number of people in this community – and in this country as well.

It is hard to know how our fellow citizens are faring. Seldom are we privy to their true feelings. Even more rare is to be mindful of their supply of – and demand for – money. The content of our checkbooks almost never enters a conversation.

So we often are left to assume how they are doing, and like we often do when we find ourselves making assumptions about the lives of others, we tend to think our experience probably is their experience, too.

I have enough food to eat, we reason, they must have enough food to eat, too.

I can pay my light bill, we reason, they must be able to pay their light bill, too.

I can afford more taxes, we reason, they must be able to afford more taxes, too.

If someone does not have enough food to eat or cannot pay the light bill or is unable to afford more taxes, we often assume there is fault, and the fault is theirs.

They are not working hard enough.

They are frittering away their money.

They are caught up in God knows what.

Sometimes that explains it. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is something for which they have not one iota of fault.

In 1979 in America, 55 percent of pre-tax income went to the poor and the middle class. By 2005 – the most recent year available – that share had fallen to 45 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

While the poor and middle class have seen their piece of the economic pie shrink in relative terms, others have watched theirs grow fatter. In 1979 in America, 45 percent of pre-tax income ended up in the hands of the upper middle class and the rich. By 2005 that share had increased to 55 percent.

To those perched on the highest rung of the income ladder, America has been especially generous. In 1979 the top 1 percent of households pocketed 9 percent of all pre-tax income. By 2005 that amount had doubled to 18 percent.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average adjusted pre-tax income for these households ballooned from $518,000 in 1979 to almost $1.6 million in 2005 – a 208 percent increase. That 26-year stretch was far less lucrative for the least affluent among us. The average adjusted pre-tax income for the poorest 20 percent of households in the nation rose a meager 1 percent – from $15,700 to $15,900 – from 1979 to 2005.

The 20 percent of households smack dab in the middle of the income ladder didn't make out much better. In 1979 when a nice three-bedroom home in Sioux Falls could be found for around $50,000, these middle-class Americans earned $51,000 on average. In 2005 when a nice three bedroom home in Sioux Falls cost two, three, four times what it did in 1979, they earned $58,500 on average – only $7,500 more.

There is nothing to suggest the divide in America between those who have much and those who have less has narrowed since 2005. On the contrary, the evidence suggests it has continued to widen.

When the Pew Research Center asked more than 2,400 adults earlier this year to compare their lives today to their lives five years ago, only 41 percent said their lives were better. Never has this percentage been so low in the more than half a century that Americans have been asked this question.

Likewise, when the 2,400 adults were asked to describe their financial condition, almost six of every 10 middle-class respondents and seven of every 10 lower-class respondents said they have just enough money to pay their bills or they said they have enough money and just a little more.

When asked if they had to cut their spending within the past year because money was tight, more than half of the middle-class respondents and three-quarters of the lower-class respondents said yes. Finally, when asked whether it is more difficult or less difficult today for middle-class Americans to maintain their standard of living than it was five years ago, almost 80 percent of all 2,400 respondents answered more.

If ever the tide was rushing in, if ever the boats of all Americans should have been on the rise, it was the past three decades. That span witnessed three of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history. The productivity of American workers during that time marched consistently higher. In addition, American women entered the labor force like never before. Two-thirds of all women in the United States between the ages of 20 and 64 now hold jobs. In more than half of all married households, both the husband and the wife work.

Though it was written in 1967 about a different kind of civil unrest, the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth" captures in its first two lines the sentiment of millions of Americans today: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." People are confused. They were promised if they worked hard, they would prosper. Others around them had that promise met. Of this they are certain because everywhere they look are the symbols of fantastic wealth.

Yet it wasn't met for them.

And they are wondering why.

Not being able to afford pictures to put on their walls is not what worries people struggling to make ends meet, of course.

What worries them is not having walls to put pictures on – or money to go to the doctor or to buy gas or to send their children to college.

Those are real concerns of which I have no concept. I know not their weight or their mass. They are outside my experience, and even if I closed my eyes for a thousand years, I could never imagine how monstrous and frightening they must be.

I try not to lose sight of that fact.