What Happened to the American Dream?

An individual can’t pay a 30-year mortgage if they don’t have a 30-year job.

Most of my life, I’ve tried to stay out of politics. I’m in favor of what’s good for most of us, regardless of party. I oppose unproductive chaos and divisiveness. I don’t support a president declaring student loan forgiveness with the wave of a pen. For one thing, it’s not fair to the people who paid off their student debt. For another, people intentionally took on the burden of college loans – it wasn’t unjustly thrust upon them; why should taxpayers take on that burden? Third, it doesn’t solve the real problems: education costs too much, and US citizens wages are too low. It wasn’t always like that.

If you, yourself, are not a Baby Boomer or older, and you don’t know someone who is, then find a Boomer and ask them about their early years. Talk with them about the post-Word War II prosperity that built a strong and healthy American middle class. Learn about the trade unions that ensured job stability and fair wages, and promoted safe working conditions as well as good healthcare and retirement benefits for their workers. Regardless of union influence, it was common for a person to spend their entire working life as an employee of one company. A worker could expect annual pay raises and periodic promotions. Most jobs had a documented progression of how an employee could work their way up the job ladder with increasing responsibilities, authority, benefits and pay. The American Dream was alive and well.

Those days are gone.

United, maybe we can bring them back.

By the early 1980s, the field I worked in, petroleum exploration, was cutting wages and closing facilities. In the mid-1980s, loan interests, including mortgage rates, were in the double digits. Balloon mortgages were popular. In theory, a lower rate in the early years would allow more workers into the housing market. The expectation was that a new homeowner’s on-the-job raises would keep up with or exceed the ballooning mortgage payments with the previously-set ballooning mortgage rates. The problem was that later in the 1980s, wages stagnated while pre-determined interest rates on the balloon mortgages continued to rise. Mortgage companies and banks were unforgiving, and refused to work with homeowners who proposed payment plans to catch up and become current. The problem was so severe and so pervasive that by the early 1990s, HUD (Housing and Urban Development) had a program to help homeowners through foreclosure.

By the early 1990s, rents and housing costs skyrocketed in high-growth locations such as the Front Range cities (Denver metro area, Colorado Springs, Pueblo) in Colorado and elsewhere. Job protections and benefits were eroded. Labor unions were gutted by legislation. Executive salaries and their bonuses spiked while worker wages stagnated and job stability became a thing of the past. Jobs by the tens of thousands were moved overseas where wages were low. US unemployment was high. Job layoffs and losses were common. So many citizens were unemployed in 1993 that eligibility to draw unemployment benefits was extended by six months. Employer attitudes toward employees became more and more crass and disrespectful.

Conditions continued to decline through the 2000s and 2010s. Employers cut jobs and hours, reducing both wages and benefits costs. Executives were given outrageous wages, bonuses, and perks. Healthcare costs continued to rise. Workers’ wages had less and less purchasing power.

Today, young people are struggling to make ends meet, often needing roommates in order to afford rent, or living at home with parents in order to work and pay for higher education. In 1970, a minimum wage worker could afford their own apartment rent, transportation to their jobsite, a modicum of entertainment and restaurant meals, and still put aside some savings. No longer is it that easy. Young adults today too often are struggling to pay rent, with no hope of being able to purchase their own home.

Home ownership was a hallmark of the American Dream. Workers’ prosperity was expected to improve each year, with no end in sight. Each generation was expected to have a better standard of living and more leisure time than the previous one. Home ownership was a given. Then, suddenly it wasn’t. No hope for home ownership is a bleak outlook. That’s a recipe for low morale. In a population who has lost hope, whose future is bleak, and whose dreams have been dashed, how long will they remain docile? How long are they going to sit quietly in front of America’s Got Talent before they realize they need to act? When they do, are they going to storm the Capitol, or are they going to vote out the legislators who fail to support the needs of the many in favor of the big campaign donations of the wealthiest one percent? There’s a word for the government style whose legislation consistently favors the ruling class rather than the citizen majority – and it’s not “democracy”. In actual practice, this is the level to which our government has sunk. It’s not too late to turn it around, and that option had better be taken seriously. The next mob storming the Capitol may not be as polite as the last one.

To Fix the Economy, fix the Middle-Working Class

Experts have propounded and opined about the economy for years. I simply see that a nation’s economy is based on the prosperity of the bulk of its citizens. If 75% of a population works for wages that cover their living expenses and has long-term job stability allowing homeowners to pay 30 years of mortgage payments without interruption, that’s a good, healthy basis for a strong, healthy economy. The mortgage may be paid off by the time the homeowner retires from working, allowing presumed retirement benefits to sufficiently cover their cost of living.

Home ownership is highly regarded in the United States. If that’s the big goal most of us shoot for and most of us achieve, we all win. If we keep trying for that brass ring, and it’s unachievable because of job losses and layoffs, or payments are defaulted when wages don’t keep up with the cost of living, everyone loses. An individual can’t pay a 30-year mortgage on their home if they don’t have a 30-year job. That is, a job having wages to comfortably cover the cost of living, plus allow for unexpected expenses, put their kids through college, and enjoy a couple weeks of annual vacation for rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation. There was a time when a person could work for the same company for the entirety of their working years, then enjoy retirement with steady, though decreased, income, and still have healthcare benefits. That has become exceedingly rare. One reason for becoming as rare as an endangered specie may be that elected government employees, both federal and local, enjoy lifelong and high quality retirement benefits and healthcare; they don’t experience the same pain after a job loss that everyone else does.

As long as the United States had a large, healthy, and growing middle class and workers were satisfied with reasonable prosperity, politics wasn’t the powder keg that it has become in recent years. I neither knew nor cared about the political affiliations of my friends. It wasn’t even a topic of conversation. By 2016, it did become a topic of conversation among friends; fortunately we have enough respect for one another that our conversations are civil and mutually informative.

My observation is this:

• Around 1980, those in control of our government forgot that a prosperous citizenry is fairly quiet and docile. A common idiomatic term might be “fat, dumb, and happy”. I expected to be not-so-fat, not-so-dumb, but at least happy-ish in a string of increasingly better jobs for a good employer throughout my career.
• Corporations began to swing away from keeping employees happy and toward rewarding upper management for stripping operations down to the bare bones with as few employees as possible working for the lowest wages. This means less experienced people doing more work for less money. “Faster, better, cheaper,” was the mantra of the 1990s. The quality of work and the consumer experience suffered. Customer support often is more exasperating then helpful when consumers call to complain. We all notice this too frequently.
• It also means the end of job stability. The end of income meeting living expenses. These have been on a downward spiral since around 1990.
• By the 2000s, most of us are aware of problems both in the economy and in our quality of living. Some of us had experienced better prosperity in the mid-twentieth century, but many have not. If you haven’t experienced a better life, can you identify specifically what’s wrong?
• What’s wrong is that, hand-in-hand, corporate interests and politicians whose campaigns are funded by those corporate interests, together, had abandoned the idea that there was a benefit to maintaining at least a modicum of “happy” for the common man and common woman.
• I dislike using the term “oligarchy”, yet based on its literal meaning coupled with the percentage of legislation passed to benefit the wealthy and corporate interests versus the 90% of us in the “common” category, the US has joined the oligarchical ranks of China, Russia, Turkey, North Korea, and others that most of us would choose not to emulate.
• To put it in more graphic, easy-to-understand terms, most of us feel like we’re up the creek without a paddle, SOL (sh!t out of luck), screwed, hosed, forgotten, and so on. You get the idea.
• Along came Trump. His dog whistle was that he called out the establishment by naming them with every insult in the book.
• The corporate and legislative establishment, along with the two major political parties, mostly well-deserve a few insults for leaving the common worker face-down in the dirt.
• The ensuing problem, in part, has been the lack of discernment on the part of those responding to Trump’s dog whistle. Why, on earth, did they think it was okay for Trump to give corporations a large and forever tax break, while at the same time, the break for everyone else was set to expire after five years? It was a smokescreen, people, and you fell for it. He gave his campaign donors just what they wanted, by providing a small treat to those having shorter attention spans, evidently not exceeding five years. Do you have higher wages? Improved job stability? Does your paycheck stretch further? No. It didn’t improve with Trump, and it hasn’t improved since. It has been in decline for four decades.
• Most of the country has been embroiled in shouting and name-calling for the past several years since Trump’s whistle. There are chaotic, contentious arguments and factions over race; over gender identity and sexual orientation; over mask-wearing during a pandemic caused by a new virus with which nobody had any experience; over border security, Covid vaccines, climate change. Even support for a sovereign nation attacked, without provocation, by a neighboring country trying to annex their territory, and committing war crimes in the process, has become a political bone of contention.
• Read this slowly: If someone keeps you pitted against someone else that’s presented to you as “other”, then your full attention is on the “other” whom you have been trained to believe is a threat. It is a magic trick. With your attention focused on the “other” player whom you’ve been told cheats, you don’t notice the dealer taking cards from the bottom of the deck. If you unite with the “other” player, you double your chances of catching the dealer cheating at his own game.
• Comparing median salaries and median cost of living between now and 50 years ago, the median salary would need to be double what it is in 2022 to provide the same purchasing power that it had in 1972. Instead of being baited by someone’s dog whistle, how about uniting with other workers to double all your salaries while keeping costs of living the same?
• Read the About page titled “What’s My Gig”?

Recognize the Source of the Problem

Over and over, I see people blaming the president – whomever that may be – for everything. The US president heads the Executive branch of the US government. He does not have legislative power. Congress is the Legislative branch; they’re the ones who make laws. The president has some power with Executive Orders, but those can be undone, and he may hold some influence with Congress. If we have three or four decades of legislation that favors corporations and the wealthy while kicking the legs out from under the middle and working classes, that is due to Congress, not the President(s).

If your income doesn’t cover your living expenses, vote out the representatives and senators in congress who favor their wealthy benefactors over you, and vote for representatives and senators who will support legislation that supports workers. Pay attention to what prospective candidates say they will do for you as a worker. If that’s not what they’re talking about, then press them on the matter. If they’re simply criticizing their opponent or hurling insults, that is not going to put food on your table and pay your rent or mortgage. Badmouthing someone else is an emotional distraction. It keeps them from having to commit to anything, and it makes you emotional and fearful of the candidate they’re criticizing. Don’t fall for it. How will they support your wages, your benefits, your healthcare and retirement? Will you be able to unionize if you so desire? How will their actions potentially affect prices of housing, transportation, food? How will legislation they sponsor or support affect your job stability? Will they promote legislation to provide corporate incentives to keep jobs within the US rather than overseas?

Stop Falling for Ridiculous Distractions

Most of us are continually bombarded with news spin rather than simple facts. If you don’t trust US news media, it’s easy to find British news in The Guardian or BBC News. Try Al Jazeera if you’re looking for something that has no US political bias. Learn enough science, and exercise a modicum of common sense to realize that calling the pandemic a US government hoax is ridiculous when people are dying by the thousands and being turned away to die from overcrowded Italian hospitals whose beds are already filled. Just how do you think that Jewish space lasers from Israel or Italian space satellites could actually change US election results? Those notions hold no credibility whatsoever – yet they distract thousands if not millions of US citizens from holding the current-government-of-the-day accountable for their poor wages, high unemployment, and threats of losing retirement benefits. (Why on earth are Social Security and Medicare benefits dubbed “entitlement programs” when to be eligible to receive them, you and your employers have contributed portions of your salary into them for your entire working life? Maybe it’s indoctrination intended to minimize your rage if they take them away.)

Work Together

If US citizens would stop fighting each other and instead unite and focus that time and energy toward improving worker’s rights, wages, job stability, and good benefits, we might actually get them. Organize. Make reasonable demands. Pressure your lawmakers until they support the workers. If they don’t, then vote them out and vote in someone who does care about workers and a healthy and prosperous middle class.

United, we can make positive change.