For richer, for poorer...

"Relax - this has nothing to do with marriage. It does however, have everything to do with a country becoming two nations, living within one border..."

Why is it we keep hearing that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? What ever happened to a "rising tide lifts all boats"? I guess that went out with Ronald Reagan. Now we have the bifurcation of America. Wall Street and Main Street. Two different streets. Two different Americas. Two different futures.

For example, we all know by now the demographics in this country are changing rapidly. The baby boomers, that huge bubble in our population who have come of age, are retiring. However - there are many retirees who were ill prepared for retirement. According to the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, 65% of retirees get most of their retirement income from Social Security. And of that number, half get the majority of their retirement money from Social Security. How much? Between 90 and 100% of their retirement income. Imagine what a 0% increase in Social Security does to folks who are swimming in escalating food, medical, housing and insurance costs. 

And let's not forget food stamps. In the part of America who are the "have nots", there are nearly 50 million people on food stamps. A staggering number. And it keeps growing. In addition, according to the Census Bureau, as of the end of last year nearly 50 million people lived in poverty. This is the growing underclass of America. Many of these folks are victims of generational poverty. They, as well as their parents and grandparents, have known nothing else. With the evaporation of the middle class, upward mobility has become very, very difficult.

Wall Street however, is a much different story. With the help of the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing as well as government printing presses which continue to operate at top speed, there has been some serious jack to be made on "the Street". While the top one tenth of 1% of income earners live lives only imagined in story books, the rest of us have been left out of the party. And by the way - "Richie Rich" is not just a greedy Republican. This elite class is bipartisan. There are just as many (maybe even more) Democrats as Republicans.

Going forward, how do we give people hope? How to we show the way forward to people who have been in poverty so long, it has become an all too familiar landscape? America has always promised to be a land of equal opportunity. Today, we have a chattering class who think that needs to be changed. To be a land of equal outcome instead of equal opportunity.

New leadership in both Washington and St. Paul are sorely needed right now. Even though the poor in our country are still considered wealthy by world standards, we can do so much better. But a broken system with stagnant thinking got us in this mess.

We need to fix a whole bunch of things. Paul Ryan believes we need to fix a "broken House". Good - go for it. We also need to fix or totally replace ObamaCare. It is a costly mess that we can ill afford. The same goes for MNSure. We need to corral our debt, rather than delete sequestered spending caps. We need bold, and I mean bold leadership to do this. Not just more "K Street" puppets.

For richer, for poorer. What is it going to be America? Are we going to live as one people, happily ever after? Or is this just the start of our War of the Roses?