The American Dream means different things to different people — for the Founders, it meant a place to live in freedom to enjoy life and pursue their own goals. It still means that for millions of people around the world living under oppressive regimes.
Later, it came to mean other, often more material, aspirations for many Americans who had come to take their liberty for granted — marriage, home ownership, a comfortable retirement.
Honestly, that’s a fairly lame dream in both psychological and spiritual terms. A.H. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, for example, puts physiological and safety needs — i.e., material needs — at the bottom of the scale.
And the Apostle Paul — if you read me very often, you’re probably sick of hearing about Paul by now — famously said a couple of millennia ago that he had learned to be content no matter what his material situation looked like.
“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content,” he wrote to the Philippian church. “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”
Still, it’s hard to get much else of importance done — raising a family, accomplishing lofty goals, self-improvement and growth — if you can’t make the mortgage payment.
And that’s getting harder to harder to do, according to CNBC, as expenses continue to rise faster than wages in President Joe Biden’s economy.
“Unfortunately, what has happened is that wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, by and large, for the last 50 years or so,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told CNBC.
“It becomes increasingly hard for many families to be able to attain that sort of middle-class lifestyle, that American Dream,” Gould said.
Has inflation damaged your American Dream?
She may lean left, but she’s right about that.
The outlet cited a report from GOBankingRates that found that all 50 states now require a family of four — assuming ownership of a home, automobile and pet of some sort — now require a household income of more than $100,000 just to be able to cover essential expenses, save 20 percent for retirement and such, and have some left over for incidentals.
And 38 of the 50 states — three out of four — required household incomes of higher than $140,000.
Much of the reason for that is debt, CNBC concluded.
Please don’t ask me why, but the outlet cited a clinical psychologist to make this point.
“The benchmark of a six-figure salary used to be the gold standard income,” psychologist Sabrina Romanoff told CNBC. (If Romanoff has done extensive research into the psychology of debt or the American Dream or whatever, the outlet didn’t bother to note that.) “It represented the tipping point of finally earning a disposable income and building savings and spending based on your wants, not just your needs.”
“Now people making well over six figures are still living paycheck to paycheck,” she added. “So what used to symbolize financial freedom is now keeping people stressed about making ends meet.”
According to the GOBankingRates report, Hawaii was unsurprisingly the most expensive state in which to live, followed closely by California, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey and New Hampshire, all of which required household incomes of higher than $200,000 to live comfortable, according to the publisher’s formula.
The least expensive state was Mississippi, followed by Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Oklahoma, all of which came in under $125,000 annually in the report.
Read those lists again and see if you see a pattern.
Of the 25 most expensive states, all voted for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in 2020 except for Alaska, Utah, Montana and Florida. (And, technically, Maine, which splits its delegates and awarded one to President Donald Trump in 2020 and three to Biden.)
On the other half of the list, only Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and New Mexico voted for Biden (with a similar carve-out for Nebraska, which gave one delegate to Biden).
Ideas have consequences, and expensive leftist ideas have expensive consequences.
Vote accordingly.
