“It’s like the American dream in reverse.” That’s how President Barack Obama, ten days after taking office last year, described the plight of Americans hit by the faltering economy. His catchy description fell short — the dream has turned into a nightmare for tens of millions.
So much so that an opinion poll this week showed that 43 percent of those surveyed thought that “the American Dream” is a thing of the past. It “once held true” but no longer does. Only half the country believes the dream “still exists,” according to the poll, commissioned by ABC News and Yahoo against a background of dismal statistics on growing poverty, inequality, unemployment, and Americans without health insurance.
Before turning to the gloomy numbers, a brief detour to the meaning of the phrase “the American Dream,” long a familiar part of the U.S. (and international) lexicon. The survey defined it as “if you work hard, you get ahead.” That’s neat shorthand for the concept that the American social, economic and political system makes success possible for everyone.
More expansive definitions of the American Dream invariably feature home ownership, and there the dream went into reverse on a particularly large scale, with the subprime mortgage boom and subsequent housing bust. Last year alone, there were 2.8 million foreclosures — 7,700 a day — on homes whose owners could no longer afford their mortgages.
The statistic that best explains growing doubts over the achievability of the American Dream was released by the Census Bureau in mid-September. In 2009, the Bureau said, 3.8 million people joined the ranks of the poor by falling below the poverty line, defined by the government as an annual income of below $22,000 for a family of four.
In contrast, the net worth of the 400 richest Americans rose by a healthy eight percent in the year to August, according to a list by the business magazine Forbes published a week after the poverty figures. That perpetuated a rich-poor gap of proportions similar to the 1920s, before the Great Depression. For most of the past four decades, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 percent have changed relatively little while those of the top 1 percent have tripled.
In terms of equitable distribution of income and wealth, the U.S. is closer to Iran, Argentina or Mexico than to Canada or Germany. (That is according to the Gini index, a complex statistical measure of inequality named after Corrado Gini, the Italian economist who devised it in 1912.)
THIRD WORLD AMERICA
In this context, unflattering comparisons are inevitable. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the left-leaning website The Huffington Post, just published a book entitled Third World America. “It’s a jarring phrase, I know,” she says, “but if we don’t change course — and quickly — that could very well be our future.”
As things stand, she writes on her website, “the fix is in. The game is rigged. The dice are loaded. And it starts in Washington, where special interests run the show — and where lobbyists outnumber elected officials 26 to 1. Unfortunately, there are no lobbyists for the American Dream.”
The new census figures translate into the highest poverty rate since 1994, or one out of seven (43.6 million) ranked as poor. The annual census report covers both poverty and health insurance and on the latter, too, the figure provided reason to doubt the American dream. More than 4.4 million lost health insurance, usually along with their jobs, and the army of uninsured now numbers more than 50 million.
It would have been even worse, Obama said, without additional unemployment payments and other programmes providing tax relief and income support.
The data showed that the Great Recession hit people at the lowest income levels the hardest and even for those who kept their jobs, the statistics were bleak: earnings of working men fell by 4.1 percent and of working women by 2.8 percent. The minimum wage in the U.S. stands at $7.25 an hour, less than it was (adjusted for inflation) half a century ago.
For those on the lower ranks of the economic ladder it came as cold comfort that, technically, the recession ended more than a year ago. This is according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which said in September that the recession began in December 2007, under the administration of President George W, Bush, and ended in June 2009, the longest downturn since World War II. The bureau measures a combination of macroeconomic indicators but not how people are affected personally.
Reaction to the poverty numbers has been relatively “muted” among the people’s representatives in Congress, as a perceptive article in the Washington Post noted. An explanation came from Deborah Weinstein, who heads the advocacy group Coalition on Human Needs and calls the increase in poverty a national emergency.
The problem of the poor is that they are not a powerful constituency. They don’t vote in great numbers and they don’t make contributions to re-election campaigns. Unlike the top 1 percent.
Social churn has been higher in Europe than in the US for some years.
The dream has been dead for all that time.
Reagan dealt the fatal blow, and no one has made a serious effort at resucitation.
Question is, when does America wake up and smell the coffee? Things could get ugly then.
Oh, honestly.
As I have mentioned elsewhere on these pages, my late father once remarked that Americans tend to go to extremes on just about everything. The above article is further evidence of the perceptiveness of his remark.
Just as four years ago life was beautiful and everything was great and we were all immortal, now everything is awful and getting worse and we are all going off a cliff. Nobody saw the great recession coming back then, quite the contrary in fact, prosperity, it was believed, would last a long time. So why should anyone now believe gloomsters with their dire predictions three and fours out in time?
Give your heads a shake and try on some of that legendary American optimism. It has survived much worse.
“The problem of the poor is that they are not a powerful constituency. They don't vote in great numbers and they don't make contributions to re-election campaigns.”
The problem of the poor is the Democratic Party, which does not ask why the poor do no not vote for them, despite their rhetoric of social justice.
They don’t ask, I suggest, because they already know the answer: They no longer fool anyone as to who they represent (the capitalist class), any more than the Republican Party does (the vicious capitalist class), and their spineless behavior in office, over the course of a lifetime, leaves no room for hope.
Good article.
What subsidies to the mortgage-housing sector brought was a creeping inflation in home prices that got many Americans to borrow too much to pay for the homes they live in, and finally – to the collapse of the mortgage-housing market, and the instant impoverishment of millions.
The American Dream can become a reality only if we ‘Get Real’ and stop playing the Welfare State game through subsidies to particular economic sectors and activities that are deemed to be “Socially Desirable”, mainly by the special interest groups that benefit the most from direct and indirect subsidies.
Default mode: Officials pushing levers, have no idea what's going on, or what to do about it.
WW 111 – We are all at war with our identity; moreover, we are in a box, by definition we’re partisan. How can we ever have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of our identity?? A worrisome string of words to be sure.
History is highly studied; it paints an undeniable and authentic picture, for all who screw around with a monetary usury, based system of scarcity. So, since we have clearly allowed money to become everything, we have allowed it to be come part of our identity, it is all we have ever known. This is a self inflicted, injustice. We are killing one another over money, the "Rule Of Law" is bought off, democracy is bought off. The work ethic, and a "job for money" become a joke. But wait, there is much, much, more … Stuxnet malware. Make yourself aware of it along with it's every broad implications of how we can destroy each other all in the name of money. If the plutocracy can use this technology, they will, after all it's MONEY, before lives.
The world's resources properly belong to all the inhabitants. YES or NO?? The evasive, hedging, answers come from those who still think they can win, like a twelve dollar gun hidden up the snot stained sleeve of a gangsters' hoody.
No doubt, our absolute, refusal to get off the dime is going to cause a whole lot of hurt. We need a critical mass of people to get behind a move to an economy of abundance.
We have not even come close to our capabilities and strangely they relate back to our past. As Rovski pointed out, there are places on earth were people "will survive better when things get back to basics because they never went to far from basics in the first place." Born into nature we are all, emergent, we are of the environment, we need to be out learning, exploring and caring for it. Instead we made a fatal error; we strayed far, far away from the basics. The 5 senses we were given are resource based economic tools. These same tools make us all scientist, watching for the evidence as it presents. It's stackable information; comes with breathing. With these tools we design computational tools since we, ourselves, are not designed for high functional when it comes to computational matters. For a short time you think you can handle the numbers in your head but soon, you find yourself reaching for a hand held calculator, the calculator soon gives way to the computer. Quietly, your existence has become an extenuation of technology Just as stairs are systems designed around out physical limitations, we can design a non-monetary system around our behavioral limitations. Our minds are unreliable; that's just fine. We are more than competent, to design social networks and computers that will ensure a much better future, in a highly reliable, effective manner. Let the triage begin. Tick Tock.
“Third World America?”…..LOL!!!!
Please, use a little bit of common sense and analysis before putting your ignorance in black and white.
I’ve lived in “third world” countries, and trust me, the US is far from “third world”.
Isn’t the correct terminology now “undeveloped” countries? (undeveloped, devloping, and developed).
I am eager to see authors like this eat their own words when the US economy comes ROARING back!!! (take some economic lessons, for crying out loud)
“The owners of this country know the truth, its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
George Carlin – RIP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO- 2Q
the “american dream” was an advertising campaign conceived at the end of world war two, when america’s major rivals lay in ruins and there was no serious competition from its economic rivals.
the “american dream” was doomed from its inception, as the conditions for its existence were essentially negative, in that it required the continued subjugation (economically, politically) of its nearest rivals to the needs/requirements of the “cold war.”
the end of the “cold war” meant the beginnings of an economic free-for all rivalry and, inevitably, the end of american economic/political world dominance.
a beautiful dialectic really
Dear President,
Create 360K Jobs with No Cost to Treasury
I am writing you to urge suspension of Foreign Worker (H1B) program for four years. Every year, 80K foreign workers are given American jobs based on the notion that Americans are not available to take these jobs.
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