This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

How Can We Make The American Dream Come True?

We have nothing against being rich. In this country at least, with a little luck, hard work, perseverance, and education, everyone hopes to own a home, a car, put the kids through college, and retire before we’re too old to work. Maybe even start a business. That was the American dream.

It’s simple: with borrowed capitol, entrepreneurs produce jobs for workers and, together, they provide products and services to sell in the marketplace. The selling price includes manufacturing costs, interest on loans, workers wages, and profits.

But, who sets the price, and who determines the profits? How do the workers make enough money to buy the products and services the entrepreneurs provide? Most of us are working harder, working longer, and making less than we were a decade ago. Only the rich are getting richer.

The answers today are all about the middle class. If workers can’t have unions, what is their power? Are they slaves? What about immigrant workers with no rights at all? Are they doomed to minimum wages, which are less in todays’ dollars than they were a decade ago? Must they live in ghettos?

Poor people used to live on the wrong side of the tracks; now they have entire cities all to themselves – Welcome to Detroit! Entrepreneurs moved to the suburbs, into communities of mini-mansions with guarded gates. The mini-rich moved to seaside communities, and high-priced, high-rises overlooking it all. Their children attend private schools; they don’t go to state-run public schools with bigger class sizes of lower class children.

The middle class is disappearing. The “trickle-down” theory is running in the wrong direction. The rich are getting richer, though. Those made-it-all-on-their-own-millionaires who hide their profits offshore, pay their employees minimum wages, and vote to bailout banks that fail. They make millions of dollars even when they parachute from the top of a corporate ladder.

Some Republicans in Congress are getting rich, apparently, just by saying, “no!” They want to buy their “dream house” on Pennsylvania Ave.

But, you have to give it to them – they know how to make people vote against their own self-interest. They ridicule the poor – for being poor: “layabouts who want everything for nothing!” They have convinced the mini-rich and wannabe-rich that they will be rich, if only they vote Republican.

Rich Republicans in Alaska convinced a plumber, who didn’t even have a plumber’s license, that Sarah Palin should be President of the United States. Wow! They are great communicators – that’s for sure.

But, what will they do when there is no middle class left to buy their products and services? Oh, I forgot: China!

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?