If you didn't believe it when we told you, now USA Today has independently verified that a majority of Americans believe the American Dream is in grave danger:
Work hard, play by the rules and tomorrow will be better than today. That implicit promise has been at the core of the American Experience through good times and bad.
But now, whipsawed by plummeting home values, $4-a-gallon gas, rising food prices and gyrating financial markets, Americans increasingly fear that the national bargain has unraveled, that their once-steady march toward affluence has derailed. In a new USA TODAY poll, 54% of those surveyed say their standard of living is no better today than five years ago.
"Fewer Americans now than at any time in the last half century believe they're moving forward in life," concluded a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center.
The USA TODAY respondents were more upbeat about the prospects for improvement in the next five years, but only 45% expect their children to live better than they do.
The report USA Today is citing to reinforce their own findings is "Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life", released in April by the Pew Research Center. Among its findings:
Americans feel stuck in their tracks. A majority of survey respondents say that in the past five years, they either haven’t moved forward in life (25%) or have fallen backward (31%). This is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup organization.
As of 2006 (the last year for which trend data are available), real median annual household income had not yet returned to its 1999 peak, making this decade one of the longest downturns ever for this widely-accepted measure of the middle-class standard of living. Over a longer time period, the picture is much brighter; since 1970, median household income has risen by 41%.
As expenses have risen, middle income Americans have taken on more debt, often borrowing against homes that, at least until recently, had been rising rapidly in value. The median debt-to-income ratio for middle income adults increased from 0.45 in 1983 to 1.19 in 2004. Ratios have also increased for upper and lower income adults, but not by as much.
(Cartoon at top by Nate Sullivan. Used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license.)
