The American Dream Web Text

The Great American Hoax

                Everyone who can be called an American has usually once in their life heard the concept of the American dream. You work hard, you become successful, and that’s that, but there are so many countless cases of this not being true that it’s a wonder why the American dream still lives in people’s hearts to this day. “The Working Poor” by David Shipler delves into the countless stories of people’s American dream being cast out the window and never looked back on again. While the American dream used to be something to look forward to, it is now an outdated belief ruined by modern societal beliefs.

A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned…

   Americans have been ravaged by the recent economical down turn in ways you couldn't imagine. Everyone has been affected by it, namely common people, but also big business. Big businesses are in business for one reason, to make money and to keep the money they make. In modern economic times almost all businesses live by that old saying, “a penny saved is a penny earned”, and to save this penny it is almost always coming out of the workers pockets. A prime example of this would be Wal-Mart and its employees. One woman named Caroline who is outlined in “The Working Poor” was stated to have “earned $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working cash registers at a vast Wal-Mart superstore” (Shipler 50). Caroline being a dedicated worker at Wal-Mart set aside years of her life to the store, constantly being promised raises in pay and growth in the company, only to be left in the dust making not a dime more than minimum wage to this day.

Living Expenses

          Housing in America isn't cheap, probably because there’s this all of this dream to go around here and all, but the average minimum wage worker can’t afford to live, the most basic premise of life, unless they hold two minimum wage jobs at the same time. Going back to Caroline, she was working a single minimum wage job at the time and using about half of it on living alone. “[She was earning] the equivalent of $3.70 [an hour] taking into account the rise in the cost of living” and this was over a decade ago. Since then housing prices have done nothing but go up over the years. The reason this happens in the first place is the fact that people let it happen. They accept rents of $600+ a month for a room no bigger than the average stock room at a small business because they are forced to by the housing oligopoly of the United States.  According to the graph above the only place that seems to have reasonable prices for living is Detroit, and we all know no one would want to live in Detroit.

Greed: For Workers and Their Businesses Alike

          Wages have always been an ever-present battle between businesses and their workers. Trying to ask for a higher wage is like going into a hostage negotiation, and it shouldn't be like that. Workers who work hard deserve a solid paying wage to show they are appreciated. Unfortunately big businesses hardly seem to agree, and certainly seem to be winning the battle of the wages right now. They feel they can get away with letting their co-workers have to half starve to death in order to keep as much money as they can, but that employee discount they give the employees must certainly be enough to make up for it. Robert H. Frank from "They Say, I say: With Readings" goes on to say, "the average inflation adjusted wage hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent" (Frank 581). This is to say that though the average worth of money was decreasing, businesses were less likely to give out more money via pay increases to their employees. The reason for doing so wasn't for self-sustainment, it was for pure, unadulterated, greed, and decreased wages weren't part of the American dream most go by.

An Overpriced Education System

                College has been around since the founding of America, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon, but why are we as Americans so reluctant to change it. The only thing which seems to change in our educational system seems to be the pensions, coming ever earlier and being higher and higher, and that’s great, more power to the teachers; education is a powerful tool and having these people around to assist people in reaching their goals is a good thing. The way we do schooling here though is a joke now though, distinguished universities teaching the same material as community colleges for upwards of 600% more money? Like housing colleges pricing has well outpaced inflation and is merely a spawn of modern greed and desire to hoard as much money as you can before you kick the bucket. As stated by Kevin Carey in “They Say, I Say: With Readings”, “A quarter of all federal aid goes to for-profits, while they enroll only 10% of students” (Carey 216). This is because of the raw greed that our society is plagued with, until we do away with our greed and need to overprice everything, we will stay in the sorry state were in.

                Clearly Americans have a lot more to worry about than to dream about. Until we can get over ourselves and realize that we aren't progressing as a society, we will be stuck in our ever growing hole of and economic state. Maybe if we dream long enough, and hard enough than someone will actually take the initiative to start us in the right direction, until then we will just have to put up with the abuse which allow on ourselves. 

Works Cited

Gerald Graff, C. B. (2012). They Say, I Say: With Readings. London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Knopf, 2004. Print.