The Shattered American Dream

The American Dream basically depend on the myth that as a nation we are moving together toward greater prosperity, greater equality, which any hard worker can achieve without any discrimination. Minorities are attracted to the American Dream to benefit in their lives. Because they strongly believed that any hard working American can achieve the American Dream without racial discrimination. Economist Paul Krugman concluded that the American Dream was now simply dead and the American economy didn’t provide any incentives and encouragements for upward mobility. Krugman explained, “The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general rule, once they've reached their 30s, people don't move up and down the income ladder very much.” Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, showed that highly unequal countries have low mobility; the more unequal a society is, the greater the extent to which an individual’s economic status is determined by his or her parents’ status. According to Krueger projections, the America will have even less mobility in the year 2035. He predicted that children, who will be born to lower economic segment, would stick to the same group in their life.

The Occupy Wall Street movement’s “WE ARE THE 99%” slogan perfectly matched with the ground realties of the economic inequalities in the US

During the post Second World War period, 1945 to 1973, the US achieved its greatest economic success. During this time period, median family income doubled and the poorest American’s national income share increased by 0.7 percent and the income of the wealthiest 5% decreased by nearly 3 percent. During this economic boom, productivity grew by 3.3 percent annually, inflation-adjusted wages increased by 2.5 to 3 percent per year and real wages grew by 75 percent. During this period American workers worked few hours per year compared to European countries.

The four decades that followed recorded the worst economic inequality in the US history. While the wealthiest five percent of Americans doubled their income between 1979 to 2009, the poorest 20 percent saw their income drastically decline. In 2003 two French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez disclosed, the top one percent of super-rich Americans grabbed nearly 25 percent share of national income in 2007, compared to 10 percent in 1980. They also revealed that even among the richest 10 percent of Americans, top one percent accounted for half of their group’s income. The US economy recorded the worst annual rate of productivity average less than half a percent during 1973 to 1988. During the last four decades, productivity stagnated and wage growth deteriorated for low income workers. From 1979 to 2001 the poorest 10 percent of workers’ wages declined by four cents per hour and ten top 10 percent of wage earners increased their earning more than 23 percent. However during this period CEO- to- worker compensation skyrocketed.

In year 2000, CEO earned 310 times the pay of an average worker. Hudson argued that rising income inequalities during last four decades were related to productivity stagnation and the decline in wage growth. During the last four decades, low income and middle class workers’ earnings reduced significantly. In these circumstances female partners were forced to join the work force to meet their family needs and one partner had to do more than one job. Even with this kind of hard work and sacrifices, they could not get into the success ladder.

Beside the unequal income distribution, inequality in wealth also rapidly increased, during the last few decades. The New York Times columnist Nicholas D Kristof disclosed in his article “America’s Primal Scream” that, the top one percent of super-rich Americans had a net worth of 225 times the worth of median households and this was a record wealth inequality in US history

Compared to European countries, the US recorded worst wealth inequality, where top one percent of super-rich acquired 40 percent of the country’s total wealth. In recent years, rich got richer and poor got poorer, and the recent economic recessions also hit bad on low-income groups. In 2010, 46.2 million Americans were recorded as poor and this was a 52-year record high. Hudson described impact of unequal income distribution. He writes as “the rich families wealth have significant advantage over poor, when their children try to climb the social ladder and existing grave wealth disparity in the society, has shattered the American Dream”.

David I Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher indicated that income inequality is greater in the US compared to European countries and there is a wider disparity between rich and poor parents who can invest in their children. A recent study found that children’s economic backgrounds are a major factor on their school performances in the US rather than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France. He further describes unequal income distribution crisis in the US, “Being born in the elite in the U.S gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced and being born poor in the U.S gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada”.

If we consider minority groups in the US, during the last four decades, racial income and wealth inequality also have significantly increased. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2009 median Black family income was recorded as 57 percent of median white family income and Hispanic Americans earned 64 percent of median white family income. Today, minorities like Blacks and Hispanics are more than four times likely to be poor as whites. During the 1960s it was widely assumed that ending the discrimination would improve the economic as well as legal status of minority groups. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s substantial numbers of black families moved into the middle class, and even into the upper middle class; the percentage of black households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution nearly doubled. Around 1980 the relative economic position of blacks in America stopped improving because income disparities in the United States began to widen dramatically, turning America into a society more unequal than at any time since the 1920s. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described adversely affecting black economic progress in two ways: “First, because many blacks were still on the lower rungs, they were left behind as income at the top of the ladder soared while income near the bottom stagnated and second, as the rungs moved farther apart, the ladder became harder to climb”. As a minority, Black families have faced the upward mobility hurdle.

During the pre-1973 period, America was the world’s largest manufacturer and the world’s number one economic powerhouse. This global position has been increasingly changing during the last four decades. China, Japan, South Korea, India and other new manufacturing powers have posed competition on the US. As a result US manufactures started the “deindustrialization” process, which led to the closing of thousands of US plants and moving the production to countries with a lower labour cost. From 1973 to 1986, 1.7 million US manufacturing jobs were lost to “deindustrialization”. Globalization and technological innovations also pressured the US manufactures to downsize their plants, outsource services and to lay off thousands of US workers. In addition “skill-based technical change”, which demanded new technical skills for manufacturing sectors, also caused job losses and led to higher economic inequalities in the US society. But the US is not only the country faced this “deindustrialization” challenge. While European governments took drastically bold decision to protect their work force but the US right wing policy makers encouraged the job killer “deindustrialization” process without concerning their workforce.

Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, who authored Unequal Democracy, pointed out, economic inequality grew more rapidly during Republican controlled White Houses because of their pro-business public policies. Bartels further argued that the introduction of business influenced public policies of right-wing political groups, which helped create rapid inequalities in 1970’s. The policy makers encouraged deindustrialization, downsizing and other economic restructuring tools without being concerned about the impact on workers’ wages; they supported anti-union policies, which destroyed worker rights and economic justice. They have been campaigning for “reducing the size of government” policy for the last four decades and tax cuts for rich people. These policies threaten the social safety net and dismantle the institutions, supporting low-income people. Hudson argued that the US education system failed to invest in new technological changes. In spite of investing in public education, they drastically cut funds for public education and raised college tuition during the past few decades. This policy had the dramatic impact on minorities and low-income groups where they lost equal opportunity to climb up the social economic ladder. The author argues that a policy of progressive taxation needs to be implemented to reduce inequality in the US society. But the right wing government’s policies gave tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and put more tax burden on the middle class and low-income groups. Past Republican governments reduced tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. The Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest one percent.

Taken from here