We Can’t Afford to Be American Anymore
And the problem is much bigger than gas and groceries
As a child, I was sold the same “American Dream” story as most of my friends. America was, as I saw it, a pretty simple transaction. Work hard, and everything will be ok. And while I never really bought into the whole “you could be President when you grow up” story that we still tell too many kids today, I believed fully that I could, and certainly would achieve the same kind of upper middle-class safety that my parents had been able to secure for my brother and me. Decent house in the suburbs, two cars, college fund, full cupboards, all of that.
What I didn’t know was that I and the rest of my then young Gen X brethren had been sold a bill of goods, and while Ronald Reagan, who was President at the time, talked a good game about American exceptionalism, he was at the same time busy selling my future to China and beginning a decades-long process of American decline, one that no one yet has been able to reverse.
So today, the whole work-to-succeed ratio is getting kind of silly. It’s still possible to get by, but unless you’re willing to take on a six-figure debt to get a college degree, you’re likely going to need two or three jobs to do it. I could go on and on, but it’s perhaps simplest just to say that in my lifetime, it has become harder and harder to live the American Dream, and soon, it may be impossible.
And while my audience is probably nodding its collective head at my observations, I am yet to prove anything I’ve said. So far, this is just how I feel. So I went out into the world in search of the best form of my argument, in search of the proper data to prove (or perhaps disprove) what I feel is true. I found all that I wanted and more, but of all the stats I combed through, there was one that hit me the hardest.
In America today, the average age of a first-time homebuyer is over 40 years old. When I graduated high school in 1992, that number was 28.
I chose this stat specifically because home ownership in America is seen as the “starting point” for building a family, and especially for building family wealth. This is still the way the “American Dream” story is told to working-class children. It’s not true for all, of course, since we live lives and build families in a multitude of ways, but this is certainly still the most common way it is done. This means that a massive portion of America’s working class is now starting their lives 12 years later than I did. In a sense, we have stolen 12 years from the next generation to pay for our excesses, and that number is growing.
So as we watch all the coverage about gas prices and groceries, it’s important to understand that the problem is so much bigger than the headlines. The real story is the debt we have forced onto our children, the pensions our parents had that we won’t, the healthcare we can only somewhat afford when we’re healthy, the unions we don’t belong to, and the retirement that for many of us will never come. My lefty friends like to call this “late-stage capitalism,” but I call it something else.
The death of the American Dream.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.