Goodbye American Dream

As I begin my final year in my master’s program tonight, here’s a section from my reading that I wanted to post. It’s from a reading on family systems for my lifespan development class.

The political and economic system

As John Kenneth Galbriath (1996) has said, the political dialectic in the United Stats used to be between capital and labor, between employer and employee, but now the struggle is between the rich (and those aspiring to be so) and the poor, unemployed and those suffering from racial, age, or gender discrimination. Our democracy has become in large measure, a democracy of the fortunate.

The role of the government is disputed. For the poor, the government can be central to their well-being and even survival. For the rich and comfortable, the government is a burden, expect when it serves their interests as in military expenditure, Social Security, or the bailout of failed financial institutions. The United States has the widest gap between the rich and poor of any industrialized nation in the world. In 1989, the top 1 percent of American households owned nearly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 20 percent owned more than 90 percent and this gap has continued to grow (Galbraith, 1996).

We believe that this state of affairs-rich versus poor-marks the end of the “American dream,” which promised upward mobility in exchange for education and hard work. Now, the poor are not given access to adequate education, technical training, or any but dead-end jobs. We who have lost the will to make the dream possible pay an unacknowledged price in increased cynicism and despair and a loss of pride in the unstable and violent world we are leaving our children and grandchildren, for which we blame the poor.

Carter, E. A., & McGoldrick, M. (Eds.). (2005). The expanded family life cycle : individual, family, and social perspectives (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.