Before I go any further maybe now would be a good time to define the term.

The American Dream is a phrase that entails the belief that everybody can find success in the United States through hard work, no matter their background.

The term “American dream” is used in many ways, but it essentially is an idea that suggests that anyone in the US can succeed through hard work and has the potential to lead a happy, successful life. Many people have expanded upon or refined the definition to include things such as freedom, fulfillment and meaningful relationships. Someone who manages to achieve his or her version of the American dream is often said to be “living the dream.”

Now that we have that out of the way….it looks like the ‘Dream’ is not so much alive except for the people that ‘made it’.

A new survey by the WSJ tells a worrying tale….

Belief in the American dream is fading, with only 36% of respondents to a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey agreeing that anyone who works hard can get ahead. That’s down from 53% who agreed with the sentiment in 2012 and 48% in 2016, the Journal reports. In the latest poll, 45% said the American dream once held true but doesn’t now, while 18% said it was never true, up sharply from 4% in 2012. The poll revealed big divides on the issue: Only 28% of people under 50 agreed that anybody could get ahead through hard work, compared to 48% of over-65s. The figure was 46% for men and 28% for women.

Half the poll respondents said life in America is worse than it was 50 years ago, while 30% said it was better. The Hill reports that the survey comes at a time when the economy has shown itself to be surprisingly resilient, with unemployment numbers strong and inflation down months after economists predicted a recession. Poll respondents from both political parties said they felt their financial situation was increasingly precarious. “We have a nice house in the suburbs, and we have a two-car garage,” Missouri resident Oakley Graham told the Journal. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that money was tight.”

Graham, a 30-year-old stay-at-home dad whose wife works as an electrical engineer, said life is “objectively worse” than 50 years ago because labor unions are weaker. Another Missouri resident, 78-year-old retired electrical inspector John Lasher, blamed inflation and the Biden administration for putting the American dream into what he said was the “past tense.” “With inflation, you’re working hard just to make ends meet, and then any extra work that you put in is just trying to get so you’re not in the hole,” he said.

Why is the economy doing this….good jobs and higher wages are out there waiting?

Explaining the state of the American economy at the moment is a conundrum. The labor market is good — as is much of the economy — and people say that everything is terrible.

The past couple of years have been a solid stretch for workers in America. Unemployment is low. People who want to find jobs, by and large, can. Wages are up — even accounting for inflation over the past several months, and especially for people at the lower ends of the income spectrum. Workers really have been able to flex their muscles, whether that means quitting their jobs or unionizing or going on strike.

And yet, amid all this, poll after poll shows that Americans say the economy is absolutely awful (what Americans do in this supposedly awful economy is a different thing, which we’ll get to later). That such a strong labor market isn’t making a dent, opinion-wise, is a little weird. It seems like this jobs landscape should make the public feel better. So why do people say it doesn’t?

https://www.vox.com/2023/11/20/23964535/labor-market-employment-inflation-sentiment-economy-bad-polls

Now some experts are telling us that we may have to be happy with less affluence.

How much debt can the country pile up before it threatens to collapse the U.S. economy and bankrupt the Treasury? We are now staring at almost $34 trillion in debt — numbers so big that they begin to be meaningless. But in the real world, it requires the Treasury to fork over $659 billion in interest payments annually, almost twice as much interest as it paid just two years ago.

But wait, there’s more!

Annual interest payments on the debt could reach $2 trillion by 2030 if interest rates remain elevated and we continue to spend way beyond our means. That would make national interest payments the country’s second largest budget expenditure, gobbling up 30% of all federal tax revenue.

https://themessenger.com/opinion/american-economy-national-debt-load-federal-spending-interest-payments

This is what happens when people live off their credit cards instead of their wages…..soon or later this will come back to bite us all in the ass.

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