The American Dream is what makes Americans American. The Dream has always been about social and economic mobility, guaranteed rights and golden opportunity. This is at the heart of John Steinbeck’s epic novel Grapes of Wrath and the Joad family’s quest for a new life.
Recently, the Dream has been rudely interrupted. Global financial distress has altered spending and saving habits. The US federal government has bailed out huge companies like General Motors. Federal and state governments have huge debts.
Some states are in danger of going bankrupt. California is the most prominent example. Issuing IOUs has not helped Schwarzenegger’s heroic image. The Terminator may have his reputation terminated by all this. The Boston Globe reported less than a year ago up to 22 states are facing serious financial budget gaps.
With huge government and corporate debt, the individual citizen is left the most vulnerable of all.
The golden opportunity of early American history and the industrial revolution is becoming less of a reality. We must not forget that the Joad family, when they eventually reached California, found that it was not the “Golden State” in reality.
Americans will never rid themselves of their sense of immense possibility. I have friends who live in wealthy rural Virginia. They are proud of the fact that, less than 10 years ago, their first home was in a trailer park. You can start as a poor child in a log cabin, and end up the President of the United States, like Abraham Lincoln. There’s also a guy named Barack Obama, who did quite well.
Most Americans also don’t see their place in the global order slipping. Some of the more politically informed will acknowledge that the European Union is rising in importance. Others understand that China and India are fast rising economic forces. However, most ordinary American citizens still view their country as the world’s policeman.
The American work ethic is a vital factor in the American Dream. American folk tales make hard work a necessary part of being American. John Henry, in the famous American folk song A Steel-Drivin’ Man, “hammered his fool self to death”. Going to work everyday in a job they simultaneously love and hate makes up part of the character of a US citizen. Working hard contributes to a sense of ownership, a sense of pride.
The American Dream has not become a nightmare, but it has had a loud Wake Up Call. The Americans still want to be John Wayne, who always wins at the end of the film. We wait to see if there is a happy sequel.
Which struggle do you see as having made the most progress, to date: North v. South, black v. non-black, men v. women?
Income tax in the US has moved from being a necessary evil to a means of power on the world stage. Congress cannot get enough of them and waste is astronomical. Its a bit like the UK only here there we have 36 million taxpayers and the US has 134 million.
Our government fancies itself as an equal to the US when it comes to writing cheques on the Treasury. Is this what the special relationship really is, a credit card binge to see who maxes out first?
All US citizens are self-assessing for tax purposes.
The US tax system is sensitive to low income earners by having more tax bands than our own. Employers’ pay for health insurance but the rates are uneven across states. Individual health insurance is available but the rates tend to be higher and more uneven because labor mobility makes underwriting difficult.
Jobs and poverty are another issue. It may require a different approach to solving poverty but one that many Americans would find too ‘European’ to be acceptable. Negative income tax associated with a basic income guarantee might be one such approach.
The paper by Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis describe the issues surrounding poverty and jobs in the US. In a nutshell if workers found themselves on welfare any income from employment would not be deducted from their benefit until a break-even point had been reached. This would provide incentive to find work and allow an additional income stream whilst receiving benefits.
Could we use a similar system for MP’s pay?
The problem is that US welfare systems are a mishmash of federal and state complexity that undermine aims and objectives. They emphasize poverty by making awareness difficult. Its a tough one for the politicians to crack.
You either work or risk ill health and die. Its not so long ago that welfare payments came out of individual pension savings often forcing people into unsatisfactory labor relationships with employers.
With the collapse of the nations wealth its hard to see how citizens can pick themselves up once they are down. Its also hard to see how employers might be persuaded to pay for what is essentially a new form of wealth redistribution.
In the end its for the President to decide the way forward.
Ref: US: Year 2008 income brackets and tax rates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
An efficiency argument for the basic income Guarantee
Karl Widerquist, Michael A. Lewis; Paper 212, Section F
http://www.usbig.net/pdf/efficiencyargumentforbig.pdf
Dear Lord Taylor,
Interesting as American politics might be, I thought this blog was supposed to be about ‘Life and Work in the House of Lords’.
It would be nice if you could blog at some point about some of the things you do within Parliament.
Howridiculous.
Quite so! However he’s been to VA where he no doubt learned to whistle Dixie. On second thoughts Lord Norton being an officer of the southern militia definitely can whistle Dixie. Oh my God! I have just realised, the house is filling up with Senators.
Has the US had economic mobility in recent times? I think academic studies on economic mobility typically show the US has about the same or a bit less economic mobility than most other Western countries. Often there is a trend that suggests less economically liberal (Western) countries do a bit better with economic mobility [source needed!].
OTOH the US certainly has a rather larger divide between rich and poor than most Western countries, so poor people have it a bit tougher, relatively speaking.
How economic prosperity converts to quality of life is another question.
Perhaps Americans will one day wake up to the fact that the American Dream is in fact an American myth. It was engineered, probably by well meaning people, and has ended up stupefying the poor to accept mediocrity and no helping hand, because one day, they themselves might be millionaires. Except, in all probability, they won’t.
The only reason they oppose, for example, high taxes on the rich and a universal health plan, is that they think one day, they’re going to have so much money, ooooh, those high taxes won’t be good for them. This is their aspiration, and I admire them for it, but it’s just ludicrous.
America’s success has been called a dream with some good reasons. I think part of what is happening is that reporting in the eyes of the world and other factors force perception in where it whas not been. America has often been a place of opportunity an plenty that is true.
On the other hand: If you were a dispossessed Amerind National, an Acadian in Le Grand Derangement, An imigrant in thewoods in the Whiskey Rebellion, A New Englander driven to the Hartford Confederacy by tarrifs and embargos, a slave, a disadvantaged free black in bad times, an Irish worker building the levees in the heat and dying from mosquito carried diseases, a Chinese worker who fell ill of planters and railmen, a Southerner in the devasteated South especially in the path of Sherman’s March to the Sea, a Spanish or sometimes French Aristocrat rearing children as more or less second class citizens, a victim of carpetbaggers (Cotton Agents), a settler eating relatives as they went out west and were caught by winter, a union laborer working cheap and being persecuted by powerful detective agencies, a victim of the mass epidemics that ripped apart small towns, a child on the many orphan trains, a farmer left desolate by the Dust Bowl, a veteranof Vietnam who came back to abuse and contempt and often addicted to pain medicine — for those people and lots of other Americans the dream has not always been a pleasant one. For them it has sometimes been quite otherwise.
America has many claims to greatness. I have made most of them in my life. However, it has never been a nice easy country. That is simply absurd. The absurd is less easily advocated today.
Ladytizzy:
All three struggles are intertwined in American history, and their progress differs in each state. It is difficult to say which has made the most progress. This is why the past and, indeed, the future for America is so interesting.
Senex:
Senex, you raise some interesting points.
I will say that addressing poverty and changing welfare and tax laws will be a difficult task for politicians. It always has been. The differences between federal and state laws make the issue even more complicated.
Also, Congress is actually the branch of government to decide these issues. The President has ideas but it’s congressmen and senators that have the power to bring these bills into force. In my view, an American president has more ‘power’ internationally than he does domestically.
howridiculous:
While I appreciate your feedback, Parliament is not currently in session. We live in a connected world where American issues do have an effect upon life in this country. America is still the most powerful nation in the world, and it would be unwise not to comment on what is happening there.
Chris:
In recent years, there has been a decline in the overall economic mobility in the United States. However, Americans still continue to be the most optimistic about social potential based on intelligence and merit. Median salaries are also, overall, on the rise. It is the mind and attitude that I wished to examine. I find it hard to believe that Americans will ever give up their idea of rising from the bottom to the top.
Kyle Mulholland:
We may disagree with it, but that is the common and shared American aspiration.
Frank W. Summers III:
Yes, there has been suffering in America, as elsewhere. But, the types of people you listed were working hard to better their lives and the lives of their children. They believed they could make a change in their lives, and many of them did. They, too, were pursuing the dream, regardless of obstacles.
Lord Taylor of Warwick et al;
We, the whole world of women, workers, and ‘wimps’, and underpinningly of ‘whales,wombats, weasels, woodpeckers, winkles & worms’, need your ‘American Dream”s content, from yourself, ladytizzy, Senex, howridiculous, Chris, Kyle, Frank; and many Others venn-overlapping from other LOTB blogs and from wider ‘worlds’ of serious Life-Problem-Solving.
Oh! we need a seriously longest-term Overview model, into which any dream, nightmare, and fact-of-life-or-extinction can be fitted.
We truly need a seriously longest-term Atlas of Life & Encyclopaedia of Needs & Hows, as Human Civilisation’s central sobriety-source and as the Earth-citizen’s ‘everywhere’ rendezvous-place.
Sadly neither The Atlas of Planet Management (with Prof David Bellamy’s preface) nor any of the other highest strategic overviews and real-life reports, even Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and Ward & Dubos ‘s ‘Only One Earth’, have taken root and flourished, not throughout any of the current eleven or so civilisations around the face of The Earth.
Nor have any serial-saviours such as the UNDP Human Development Report which, by excluding an Individual-human-development index, individual(sic)-accessible and as a ‘backbone’ to the UN’s (actually questionable) Human Development Index (aggregate Longevity x Knowledge x Wealth = 1.000recurring, HDI).
From the kindergarten infant, to the terminal-bed end-of-innings loner, we humans need such an enablement: we have to be able to fit the american-dream, the white-world-dream, the black-world-dream, the muslim-dream, the minorities’dreams, and the billions of individuals’dreams, and/or nightmares, into some sort of Sane Common Mind.
I have copies of many mind-mapping kinds of work: from Buzan “Making The Most of Your Mind”, Rose & Nicholl “Accelerated Learning for the Twenty-First Century”, Phillips & Comfort “The A to Zen of Life Maintenance”, and de Bono “Six Thinking Hats”; to Hartley “Wisdom of the Body Moving”, Jencks “Your Body: biofeedback at its best without instruments” and Pearsall “Superimmunity”; …….
I have enough ‘knowledge and know-how’ to found a whole new planet of long-term thrival-and-survival human-beings !
But so far, not even mainstream professors at a local modern university have ever even heard of these works !
And one can go online and easily find ten-thousand or more equal or better works.
So, my lords, ladies and people-folk, the challenge has to be prepared; e.g.
What Overarching Mind-Map are you working to ?
Or are you (like this submissor) still just a well-fed ‘mouse’ in some rich “expert’s” bigger- pocket ?
With best respects, as well as in some desperation.