Research Paper about American dream

In today’s society, the American dream is considered a smokescreen. Americans dream about opportunity and equality, however, those dreams didn't come true. Over the past years and years to come, Americans can't meet America’s Standard. America sells false narratives to the non-wealthy class. So no, the American dream does not exist today.

To start with, Americans can not provide equality. Americans will always be fettered by racism, money, poverty, and social status. The author in The Death of Horatio Alger says“It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago”(Krugman par.1). The American poverty rate is so high that the American dreams cant come true. Americans can work three jobs and still not make it into the top percentile to reach the American dream. It's hard to create opportunities in America when some Americas started from the bottom and can never make it out because of the American standers. For instance, American standards are Americans who already have money and good education that can continue to grow, however, a lot of Americans in poverty can't grow and get an excellent education to meet the standards. Americans can try to point out the unfair inequality that America shows, but the status leader will always denounce anyone who complains(Krugman par.2). So it becomes tremendously more difficult to meet the American dream, when higher up tries to make it harder for the poverty-stricken American to move up the ladder.

 The Americans' income gap increases daily. The article Stuck in the Middle: How to Understand America’s Class System said, “American who still has a full-time job of any kind, or three part-time ones, is said to be “cling to middle-class status”(King 312) show how even the American middle class founds it hard to reach the American dream. American middle class is the main representation that all Americans should reach, but even reaching the middle class is a struggle. The American government wants its citizen to be tinkering, puttering, dull, and small-minded bore(King par.9). This shows that Americans without power can almost never move out of the social class they were born in. The Americans who are working hard to make a living just for them to barely make it across the social status bridge show how the American dream is falling.

There are some Americans that will say America is the land of opportunity. The article by our own bootstraps explained, “Even today, opportunity is rarely far from our experience. Most Americans are familiar with dozens of real-life Horatio Alger stories—Sam Walton, Ross Perot, Bill Cosby, Mary Kay Ash, to mention just a few of the famous. They catapulted themselves from the lower or middle ranks to the top''(Cox and Alm par.3). The Americans who believe that the American dream is still strong will say that America can build wealth. That Americans just need to seek better opportunities. That in America there will always be a pooper class but it won't stay that way unless America is a strict caste society, however, America is staying that way. The American pooper class can hardly jump the ladder to meet the middle class. The Americans who think the dream is still alive look back at the time when America was flourishing, but that's not happening anymore. Americans are either stuck where they were born or rising up into another class. It's so much harder to rise up to a different statute without equality and opportunity. Americans are either born with wealth and prospering or they are working three jobs just to make it in America.

In conclusion, where the American dream is where opportunity and equality are for every American, but not for the non-wealthy. Americans are working harder just to be able to see that they're not even close to the dream. That is why the American dream is dying.