American Dream Alive Or Gramm Of Salt?

Tendency is to take pols with grain of salt BUT Gramm argues en force “the vast majority of adults have higher income than their parents did” & it’s cause American Dream is about individual effort not social uniformity.

“Is the American Dream in peril?” the former Senator asks in his co-authored WSJ op ed with John Early. They concede, “Collectivists say yes & point to rising inequality of income” statistics but Gramm & friend insists “they don’t understand the Question.” That is, they argue, “A commitment to equality of outcomes in life is totally alien to the American ethos. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, America is committed to ‘an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise & intelligence.” Gramm & Early cite 5 decades of “extraordinarily similar” mobility studies, the most recent by AEI’s Michael Strain covering 2013-17, that clearly showed that 39% of our children on average over the past half-century have wound up earning significantly MORE than their parents while 37% LESS, as Lincoln would have argued was the way things should have played out in a democracy valuing “freedom” over social engineering.

Perhaps the strongest case was presented when the authors turned to the earnings experiences of the lowest earning classes: “With few advantages & often trapped in failing public schools, 63% of children who grew up” in such families earning far less than most rose to a higher income level than their parents, 6.1% rising all the way to the top” levels of income society. Maybe that’s why so many have now escape our inner cities until a “majority” of our “minority populations” now live in suburbia per the Brooking Institution’s report on 2020 US Census?

Davd Soul