The storied American Dream is, well, merely a story for many Americans.
Current, and numerous, “fails” in the U.S. economy are well-documented. Just a few months ago, for example, research reported in an AP newspaper item — “Jobs gap between rich, poor sets record” — revealed the perhaps-unsurprising information that America’s poorest citizens are far more likely to be out-of-work than the country’s richest. The unemployment-gulf separating the $20,000-a-year folks from the $150,000-a-year folks is wider, deeper, and more forbidding than it’s been. Ever.
More than 20 percent of the lowest-income Americans are unemployed. History students know that the unemployment rate in the Great Depression was not much higher than that very one-in-five figure. So for a great many of our depressed fellow citizens, the 2010s are the new 1930s. (The unemployment rate for the richest among us, for the record, is 3.2 percent.)
Now, for a flipside.
The other day in the Vancouver Columbian newspaper was this AP item — “Rising riches: One in five in U.S. reaches affluence.”
According to the article, a new book about to hit the shelves — Chasing the American Dream (Oxford University Press) — shows that one in five of us will achieve “affluent” status by the time we hit 60 years old. For at least a year in our lives, more than 20 percent of us will be winning some serious bread. Perhaps a quarter-million dollars, in fact, for at least those 12 months of earning.
These 25 million so-called new rich people (some marketers dub them the “mass affluent”) are affecting the way we do politics — and the way we talk about policies — in a big way. They tend to be more progressive (think the choice issue, for instance, and gay marriage) on social matters and they’re more conservative on fiscal questions.
Looking at General Social Survey data from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the AP found that affluent citizens don’t much favor any government ideas for closing the income gap. Also, a Gallup poll a few months ago found that six out of every 10 people who bring home $90,000 or more a year feel that a typical American already has “plenty of opportunity” to succeed. Folks making $48,000 or less a year? Fewer than half of them agreed.