The United States shut down the government for 43 days and it got me thinking about the American Dream. What are our goals and objectives as a society to deliver on this dream that is such a big part of the country’s brand. The effect of the shutdown must have some effect on the enablers of the American Dream.
When I think about this dream I go back to 1938 when my father, a sharecropper’s son from West Texas, was pushed to go to college by his mother to get off the farm. She wanted him to go to Texas Tech where he could become an engineer and make $5,000 a year in a textile mill. He followed that dream, but WWII got in the way. He met my mother, went tosea and came home with significant scars from a Kamikaze plane that blew up his ship. He got a great job with DuPont and saw his five kids become more than he imagined.
I too became an engineer, went off to war in Vietnam and then had a career with DuPont and 4 great kids. If I worked hard and followed the rules I could be as wealthy or even wealthier than my father. I realize that it is not just my dream, but our American dream and unfortunately, the shutdown uncovered how fragile it is becoming.
We learned it costs us $8 billion a month to keep the US from going hungry. I was on the board of the Kennett Food Cupboard for 9 years. We were serving 500-850 families around Kennett a month who needed an extra week of food on top of their SNAP benefits which weren’t quite enough. I remind myself that Chester County is the richest county in PA and other areas have 5 times the food insecurity that we do. SNAP works well because the Dept of Agriculture can get Congress to support the program which feeds the hungry and provides farmers over $25 billion in subsidies to make sure they get a fair price for their crops.
We agree that the American dream means our kids don’t go to school hungry, but what about our health? Health care is complicated and the longest shutdown on record was about whether the American dream would include health care. There still hasn’t been a vote on it, but it doesn’t seem likely.
The way healthcare developed, as a business supported by employers as benefits for their employees, it is very expensive with less than the best outcomes. On average it costs us about $15,000 per person and no one can really afford it if they do get sick, so we need insurance. Which means the insurance will have to cost about $15,000 a year which can be picked up by our employers and the government for very poor people (Medicaid.) Even with this, there is a big gap of about 50 million people. This population could buy it online as it was being subsidized by ACA at the cost to us of about $380 billion over the next ten years. This way a self- employed hairdresser had an expense of $300 per month for her health insurance instead of $1200 per month. This way when one of her girls gets Stage III breast cancer, which will cost her $129,400 in the first 12 months, she will be covered.
I feel certain that we can do better because I have kids living in Europe where they have great healthcare and it is a fraction of the cost of ours. My daughter in law is a Norwegian OR nurse and Norway spends more than other European countries, still just under $10,000 a year per person.
My two granddaughters were born where the maternal mortality rate is 1-2 deaths per 100,000 births (2023). Louisiana had 41.9, with California at a low of 9.5 deaths of the mother per 100,000 births. What are the other legs of the stool for the American dream? We say a “good education,” but didn’t we shut down the Department of Education? Then there is housing, public safety, full employment, climate change and just plain life affordability. Oh, don’t forget we have to pay for the solutions.
The 800-pound gorilla that is standing behind us is Artificial Intelligence which is supposed to do away with 100 million jobs in the next 20 years. That is going to be a tremendous churn in our lives, and I worry that without a sound footing for health care, food and education we could leave a lot of people behind in lives that are less than fulfilling.
When I graduated from Kennett in ‘64 most Americans (bottom 75%) owned a third of the nation’s wealth. Today we, “they” own a fifth. So, if the American Dream includes money, we have done a poor job of sharing it.
I’m all in for the American Dream but it isn’t just my dream that I want to see continue. I want it to be the dream that can be achieved by most Americans. My age group is 72% richer than the one 40 years ago, yet, Americans under 40 are 25% worse off and we wonder why the issue of affordability comes up. We can revive the American Dream, we must address the basic needs of all economic levels and do it together.
What are you doing for Kennett’s American Dream in this holiday season?
Source: Berkshire mont
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