Why the American Dream is impossible – no matter how hard you work

For more and more middle-class people, achieving the American Dream is becoming impossible due to the rising cost of living.

According to a Wall Street Journal/NORC pollthe gap between people’s desires and expectations is visible across all genders and parties. Only a third of people still believe that the American dream is “real.”

Becoming a homeowner and retiring comfortably are two common goals that are no longer guaranteed these days, no matter how hard you work for them.

The inability to buy a home is especially holding back young people who want to get started in life. For example, Kentucky resident Lily Roak says her budget once was a respectable $250,000 and that now she and her partner are “looking at homes with no walls and no floors.”

She said the priority she and her partner Jessica Holland placed on finding a home led them to postpone their engagement, wedding or having children, things their parents could do on lower salaries.

Holland told the Wall Street Journal that she and Roark feel like they’re “doing everything right, we’re saving, we’ve gone to good schools, I have a master’s degree — and yet it’s still so hard.”

They’re certainly not alone: ​​the survey found that 89 percent of people said owning a home is essential or important to their future, while only 10 percent said it would be easy or somewhat easy to achieve.

Financial security was considered essential by 96 percent of people, but only nine percent said it would be easy or somewhat easy in the future.

While generations of Americans have been promised that hard work would earn them a comfortable retirement, only eight percent said they saw this as easily achievable in their future, while 95 percent believe it is essential to their vision of the future.

“Key aspects of the American dream seem unattainable, whereas for previous generations they did not,” Emerson Sprick, an economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the newspaper.

While many Americans dream of owning a home and living in comfort, a growing number of young people admit that these goals are out of reach.

For many young people, this problem stems from the feeling that they are worse off and face a more difficult economic future than their parents did at their age.

According to Nathaniel Hendren, a professor of economics at MIT, and Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University, in 1980 only half of children were wealthier than their parents.

In 1940, this percentage was still around 90 percent. However, since the 1980s, the decline has continued gradually.

“Whether you earn more than your parents is still a question, but mobility likely reached a historic low in the early 2020s,” Hendren said.

Chetty added: ‘People are right to feel that the American dream is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, both in terms of their chances of doing better than their parents and their chances of escaping poverty.’

The crisis of confidence in the future has been severely dented by the high inflation of recent years. According to Richard Thomas, former mayor of Mount Vernon, his idyllic family life has been a struggle to keep his head above water.

Former Mount Vernon Mayor Richard Thomas, pictured with his wife Cherish Celetti and their two children, said they ‘had the American dream — now it’s the American nightmare’

Thomas and his wife Cherish Celetti bought their home in upstate New York in 2017 for $612,000 and took out a $5,400-a-month mortgage.

Despite the high costs, Celetti said it “felt like everything was going well” — before inflation sent their bills spiraling, doubling their energy bill to more than $2,000 a month.

The parents saw their American dream shattered when they cut their pension contributions to almost zero. To make ends meet, they considered selling their beloved home.

It is now worth double what they paid for it, but Thomas and Celetti say that if they sell the house, they will not be able to buy another one in the area.

“We want to stay in our community. We want to raise our children here, but the dream of being able to do that really eludes us,” Thomas says.

“We had the American dream. Now it’s the American nightmare, because it feels like the country made a promise to us and then took it away.”