Why has the American dream turned into a nightmare?
A report on the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Divided States of America estimated that 62% of New York City households do not meet cost of living standards. The evidence is overwhelming. Worker compensation, both wages and benefits, only grew 0.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, while corporate profits grew 2.7%. When you adjust for inflation, hourly wages have risen only 3% since the end of 2019, while corporate profits have gone up 50 percent.
This is the real shocker. Workers’ share of the total nation’s income has dropped below when records were started in 1947, while corporate profits of the small minority at the top who own most of the shares of stock and private equity holdings have the greatest share since 1950. People who rely on capital gains have never had it so good.
The move toward lower wages and higher profits started during the Reagan 1980s, when he said he would balance the budget, but never accomplished that formidable task. The split continued throughout the 2000s and is getting worse because billionaires are fighting over artificial intelligence and expensive data centers after concentrating on creating huge corporations with the power to raise prices while keeping wages down by fighting the growth of unions.
In the 1950s, more than a third of workers in the private sector were members of strong unions. In 2026, only 6% of workers in the private sector are unionized. Two of the largest corporations, Amazon and Walmart, spend billions keeping unions out of their employment rolls by often violating Labor Department laws. The union fights go on while health care costs explode because of cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and increases in work requirements.
“In 2025, hospital expenses increased 7.5%, with sharp increases in labor, drugs, and medical supplies,” said Rick Pollack, president and chief executive of the American Hospital Association in a recent letter. “At the same time, patients are arriving sicker, requiring more complex care, driving up hospital costs. Meanwhile Medicare and Medicaid routinely reimburse below the costs of providing services, and insurers increasingly use tactics that delay or deny payment — disrupting care and adding administrative cost and burden.”
There is a great cartoon out with two male images, one facing left and one facing right but look the same. It is titled “The Difference Between Labor And Capital.” One has a huge belly, a long watch chain across a tux front and wears a nice top hat. The other figure, looking right, has a huge sack on his back which resembles the belly on the rich man. It tells the story rather well.
Where could NYC workers go and receive excellent wages?
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has the answer — migrate to the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland or Denmark. These countries always end up at the top of the United Nations Happiest Country and People Survey every year.
“All concentrate on the Nordic social and economic model which aims to reduce inequality, boost opportunity and optimize the quality of life — providing a lift, in particular, for those at the lower end of the income scale,” Kristof said in a recent article. “You want security, health care, and the American Dream? Look to Scandinavia.”
The former Norwegian prime minister and present finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, made this rather challenging statement: “We actually live the American Dream. The American Dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”
The American comedian George Carlin was more realistic when he made this comment about our politicians and their constant use of the “American Dream” a few years ago: “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
The writer Hua Hsu described how the 1945-1975 economy created a dream about America in his article “The Curious Career of the ‘American Dream’” in the The New Yorker.
“America’s postwar population boom came of age during one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in human history,” he states. “From 1945 to 1975, the U.S. economy more than doubled, accounting for roughly one-third of the world’s industrial output. These gains were shared across socioeconomic strata, as people moved from farms to cities and from cities to suburbs. Working Americans had access to affordable homes, college educations, and jobs that provided a clear path to middle class stability. People grew accustomed to the expectation that each generation would surpass the horizons of their forbears. According to a 2019 study led by the economist Raj Chetty Americans born in 1940 had a ninety-two percent chance of earning more than what their parents had.”
I don’t believe there is a better description of the American Dream of many people.
Who will win the economic battle: capitalism or socialism?
We have countries ruled and governed by kings, plutocrats, autocrats, republicans, democrats, prime ministers, presidents, theocrats, capitalists, dictators, communists, socialists and dozens of different combinations. Nordic countries usually call themselves capitalistic-socialists or democratic- socialists. Today, in the Divided States of America we have red, blue and purple townships, counties, towns, cities and suburbs. New York City as an example, just elected a blue Muslim democratic-socialist as mayor in a purple metro area.
Before I go further, here are definitions of these terms from the newest Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary:
Capitalist: An investor of money in business for profit.
Socialist: A believer or supporter of socialism or socialist party.
Capitalism: An economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.
Socialism: A political theory or system in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles.
Perhaps these definitions will help politicians and media people add knowledge to the present noise about inequality and equity. In an article titled “What socialism is and what it isn’t” in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, Rob Port wrote: “Most communists may be socialists. Socialism is an insufferable ideology pursued by naïve people with big government solutions.”
Rob, what systems of government do Scandinavian countries have to make them the happiest people — and countries — in the world?
Why do 66 million workers in the DSA make less than living wage?
According to MIT’s living wage calculator, a single individual adult with no dependents must be paid more than $25 an hour to live in most of the largest metro areas in the Divided States of America. In many cities, starter homes or fixer-uppers are more than $1 million and one-bedroom apartments run between $2,000 and $3,000 a month.
We currently have more than 1,100 billionaires in the DSA and the top 20 hold wealth comparable to 12% of the DSA gross domestic output. Billionaires own about $10 trillion in wealth in 2026, up 31.8% since 2025, according to a report by Americans for Tax Fairness. In 2025, DSA workers earned their smallest share of Gross Domestic Product since 1947, falling down to an abysmal 53.8% of GDP in the third quarter. Millions of workers have turned to credit card debt in order to survive inflation. In the fourth quarter of 2025, total credit card debt set a record at $1.277 trillion, an amazing 63% increase since the first quarter of 2021. Billionaires and the richest people from all over the world have donated millions of dollars to fight and defeat the California billionaire tax measure on the ballot for the November election.
Musk wants to go to Mars—and many want him to stay there
The big question: How many American billionaires have said they have enough wealth? Is it the Wall Street billionaire who buys the ten seats for $795 each on his helicopter ride to his Hamptons mansion so he doesn’t have to talk to anybody on his way home from his equity firm? Would Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, worth close to $1 trillion, say it in a loose moment? He doesn’t, because he thinks “empathy is a fundamental weakness of Western civilization, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug which is the empathy response.”
In a book titled “Muskism; A Guide for the Perplexed,” authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tariff reveal a rather startling fact: “Musk doesn’t merely lack feelings of fellowship with actual humans — hardly unusual for a multibillionaire — but is outright hostile to the very idea of such feelings. The terms ‘humanity’ and ‘Western civilization’ are largely interchangeable in his lexicon; and what Musk means by Western civilization the authors make clear-is white civilization.” (Much of this information is revealed in a book review titled “Space Oddity” by Mark O’Connell in The New York Review of Books.)
Musk is rich, weird and a victim of malignant narcissism. He admits to having 12 children by five women and has expressed the ambition of fathering hundreds more so the world has many Musks. One of his adult children has transitioned to female. That transformation has wounded him so much, he has declared she is dead. She declared she has hated him from childhood. In order for the Divided States of America to have a malignant narcissist as president, the native of apartheid South Africa donated $300 million to King Donald’s campaign. As a reward, Trumpistan’s leader appointed the weird one to Director of Government Efficiency (DOGE) where he made so many funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development population experts have determined funding cuts have already resulted in the deaths of 700,000, mostly children, in Africa. One of the leading medical journals in the world, the British Lancet, has estimated cuts will lead to approximately 9.4 million more deaths by 2030.
Author Joyce Carol Oates had some thoughts on Musk. She shared them in a now-viral post on X.
“He never posts about anything he enjoys-nature scenes, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, a book, pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team, or historical events,” the post reads. “The poorest people may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the most wealthy person in the world.”
Like most billionaires, he doesn’t know when enough is enough.
