The American Dream And Poverty

In 1931, James Truslow Adam, an American writer and historian, created the term ‘American Dream’. The American Dream promises equal chance to gain success in any desired way, regardless of gender, race, nationality, or any other form of discrimination to each individual. However, there is a debate that the American Dream is not available to everyone, as they are incapable of jumping the incredible hurdle of poverty. Over 43 million people in the United States of America live on less than a dollar and twenty-five cents a day. In 1966, US president Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, similar to President Nixon’s war on drugs. At the beginning of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was 14.7%. America’s official poverty rate today is

Students in poverty tend to obtain low grades, have little academic achievement, and often misbehave. Many often drop out before graduating high school. Students ages sixteen through twenty-four are up to seven times more likely to drop out. A study published in Nature Neuroscience discovered “a link between physical brain development and poverty level. In a study of eleven hundred children, adolescence and adults from around the US, researchers found significant differences in the brains of children from the lowest income bracket in comparison to those in the highest. Families who lived on less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year had as much as 6% less surface area in their brain in areas like language and decision making than families who made more than one hundred and fifty dollars a year.” This may support why many students in poverty tend to do worse in school over middle class students. Employers usually lean toward more educated workers, leaving the poor at a serious disadvantage when it comes to work Children growing in poverty regularly have families of their own poverty. Some workplaces, manufacturing jobs have replaced their human labor with machinery and technology, which leaves many potential jobs out of the hands of people hungry for work. Having a weak education leaves them unskilled, resulting poor and low paying occupations. This creates a long lasting loop of poverty, a loop which is hard to escape. They

“Many progressives offer us straight forward solutions: more funding for poverty programs. They believe we need to transfer more wealth from people who have money to people who don’t. Conservatives have a different answer: more opportunity. Conservatives define success by how few people need help from the government, not how many we can enroll in government programs…Conservatives believe that simply giving people money doesn’t help them escape poverty. On the contrary, it can keep them locked into it. Getting things without working for them is a very hard habit to break” We can see that money is not the answer to solving poverty. According to Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, the only solution to poverty is work. “Of course, the poverty rate doesn’t measure consumption. Certainly poor people today have many more things than poor people did in 1970…our goal should never be to merely make poverty less miserable for people. Our goal must be to make poverty more escapable. (Brooks)” He proposes that we require people to work in exchange for social assistance. This way, we help them through welfare, and through work, we help them find their success. Michael Tanner, Senior Fellow of Cato