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Caleb Sanchez
Mrs. Kavinsky
AP Language
13 March 2018
The Cost Of Dreams
The world is unfair. What do you want me to say? This is how life is; there are no rules.
The only rules ar the one set for themselves and the rules that the body creates. One of those is
shelter, but now, what is shelter? Shelter is a necessity for a healthy mind and body, but what do
you need to have shelter in this day and age? That would be money. People will go where
money goes because money provides the necessities to continue existence. This creates a system
of supply and demand, so when it gets competitive it creates new buildings and jobs. Once
money leaves people go. This is why the suburbs are shrinking and how the Decline of the
American dream is intertwined with the economic state of this country.
The American Dream is Declining
Dreams are subjective to people and people make up dreams. This is a circular argument
that entails that fact that America was built up from dreams and those dreams from individuals.
One such example was the dream of a free America. where people have the right to follow their
dreams and encourage the dreams of others, but recently there is a decline in the people who can
accomplish their dreams.
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There are two main reasons why this decline has happened. One is that people are
stopping their ambitions to follow their dreams while the other main reason is that there are way
to many dreamers that fail and by placing all their effort they have to achieve nothing at the end.
59% of kids born today have not achieve higher wages than their parents suggesting a decline of
dreamers who believe in the dream (CNN). This goes along with the fact that the age group of 18
35 year olds having a staggering 63% saying it is impossible to achieve the objective. The
information gathered from an unnumbered group of people and their opinions are that the
american dream seems unachievable and understand that 59% of children didn't achieve their
dream, and this translates to a perception of having a 59% chance of failure. The low success rate
creates an argument in favor of not following their dreams and instead settling for something
inferior but guaranteed to at least survive. Affecting the financial stability due to most Americans
living paycheck to paycheck.
Both issues on the decline of American dreamers are connected. In realizing the potential
of failure and the experiences of other that have failed the dreamers simply avoid dreaming for a
practical choice. This gives hope of having a chance greater chance of achieving a necessary
wage to depend on, generally less than what would have been received from having a successful
american dream. Therefore creating a cycle, the more dreamers fail, the less encouraged
dreamers get and settle for mediocre but guaranteed wages, setting a precedent for those who
have a dream to achieve something great. Instead, they are reminded of the failure of others
started to conform to a mediocrite life. The American dream is complicated but it can only be
achieved with the major thing people care about today in this day and age, money.
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How Economics Impact The American Dream
There are several factors in the American dream but the most important are the crucial
factor of economic stability and the stock market. Within the early 1930’s there was a financial
depression that was worse and stood longer than any depression ever, the Great Depression.
During this depression there is no way any person with a dream will show up and do it since it
was hard enough to even survive and people started blaming the people in charge. This has
created a problem back then and recently there has been a major recession that has affected
society and especially dreamers of today. The way this affects the amount of jobs that available
since the recession has hit, there has been a popular act of downsizing a company(The
Sociological Quarterly ).
This creates several obstacles when attempting to achieve the american dream as the risk
of losing your job is related to how bad the economy is doing at the moment. By downsizing a
company it creates a loss for jobs and will make it near impossible to get a job their if an
individual wanted to work there in the first place. This explanation is how economic statistics
affect the american dream at an essential level. There is a closed system of this fact that took
place in the 1900. I am alluding to the manufacturing plant that the company Ford had build that
same year in detroit.(Once the american dream; chapter 5) In the year 1910 there were only
4,120 residents living in the location where the plant was placed. Ten years later in 1920 the
population spiked to 46,599. This suggest that just like America, people moved to detroit in order
to achieve the american dream that was based on the automotive company at that time. Therefore
it created a system that since the economy is doing well in that location so are the amount of
people willing to attempt pursuing the American dream.
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Ford shut that plant down in favor of wider spaces to accommodate the production line
and to minimize property tax in 1950 and made the economy decline significantly from their
absence in detroit. Just like how the recession affected the perception of the dreamers to a
negative stance, it was even worse for the 50,000 people living in that place where it made it
impossible to dream in that environment forcing people to go elsewhere to achieve the American
dream. This is on a scale that will be likely to never happen but with the way things are playing
out it seems that the decline this time will have nowhere to go since it is happening at a national
level. This may seem scary at first but there is always something that can remedy what isn't
completely destroyed
What can be done to fix this if possible and why it is important to fix this problem
When we think of a fix we think of solutions, in reality there are no real solutions only
suggestion that can prolong the inevitable for as long as possible. One such suggestion is a fairly
aggressive in the presentation that “New public policy initiatives are needed”,(Desmos) and state
that there needs to be 2 things that have to be changed. One is to “ensure that all Americans have
the chance to achieve the middle class” and two is “ensure greater security for those in the
middle class.” These sound like sound arguments to create when economic stability is not as
common as it had once been back when WW2 ended and having them will help boost the
economy and stop the decline of the american dream.
The reason why Amy Traub and Heather Mcghee have as valid reason is because i have
valid incentive to be worth the effort to achieve. In a certain scenario, if any individual can
achieve the middleclass that makes it a dream that can be persuaded by dreamers therefore
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spreading positive moral to the others that have also dream about middle class. The second point
is that it will be harder to lose such a standing if they have the social positions ensured making it
easier to have future generations keep the middle class wealth making it a sort of inheritance that
an ancestor worked hard for.
These are very practical in their own right but another solution to this problem could be
to get“and education”,(The Economist)what is being suggested is not that students should get an
education but the government should assist everyone to get education this way creating
competent people that can climb up to middleclass instead of dragging the wealthy down by
attempting to make everything equal. Anyway with the review of government, how would all
this affect the government?
Side effects that might occur to democracy if the American dream dies
Democracy is a very touchy issue and that includes any type of government because this
includes the top people who wish to stay in power as much as possible. What democracy is a
feeling of caring out for one another,(Huffington post). This is how the American dream affects
the type of government that is democracy. While mostly because the American dream is the basis
of how the county started, it will cause irreparable damage to the country and would later just
become a giant political mess full of politician that care only for the people on election day to sit
in one of the most powerful positions in the world. So just to sum up this small section since it is
the yin and yang of eachother, one needs support from the other side to support itself and odeals.
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While you have now discovered why the american dream is so important what should
you do about it? Of course since you live on this planet there is something for you to do, that is
share this information with everyone else with you. The man part of dreams are that they are
unreliable but in the end for the american dream there is always an anchor holding it down
formerly. That would be the fact that money is the major essence of what the american dream has
become. Money is what influences everything and since money is a side of the American dream I
fell that the decline of the American dream is intrinsically linked with the economic system and
statistic of the USA.
Works Cited
Citation machine
Source 1 : http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/news/economy/americandream/index.html CNN
“Amrican Dream is out of Reach”
Source 2 : https://www.economist.com/node/7059155 The Economist, Inequality and the
american dream
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Source 3:
http://www.demos.org/publication/stateamericandreameconomicpolicyandfuturemiddlecla
ss Desmos, “ State of the American Dream: Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle
Class,”: by: Amy Traub and Heather Mcghee
Source 4
; http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14btdf6?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText
=decline&searchText=of&searchText=the&searchText=american&searchText=dream&s
earchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffacet_chapter%3DY2hhcHRlcg%253D%25
3D%26amp%3BQuery%3Ddecline%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bamerican%2Bdream%26amp%3B
ed%3D%26amp%3Bpage%3D1%26amp%3BsearchType%3DfacetSearch%26amp%3Bs
d%3D%26amp%3BcurrentPath%3D%252Faction%252FdoBasicSearch temple
university press, “Once the american dream”
Source 5
; http://www.jstor.org/stable/4120881?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=ec
onomy&searchText=affecting&searchText=the&searchText=american&searchText=drea
m&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Deconomy%2Baffecting%2B
the%2Bamerican%2Bdream&refreqid=search%3A118b217a6106a704020372afc73e8894
&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents the sociology quarterly,
Source 6
; https://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgelakoff/whydemocracyispublict_b_911205.h
tml The Huffington Post, “Why Democracy Is Public: The American Dream Beats the
Nightmare”