Opinion: The American Dream and the Delicate Balance

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

What is “The American Dream?”

To an extent, a term like this has a slightly different meaning for every individual, but for the century in which the term has been part of our shared language, the term has been built around certain basics:

The American Dream is the confidence that law-abiding, hard-working Americans will have the opportunity to enjoy a generally safe, productive life for themselves and their families, with their standard of living improving, bit by bit, with every generation.

It’s not the belief that every wide-eyed immigrant will strike it rich upon arrival and have a mansion by the age of forty; it’s the promise that the societal and government structure won’t hold you down, like they do in most other countries. In Feudal Europe, your father lived in a shack because his father and grandfather did, and in the same way, you’ll live in a shack and so will your children and grandchildren. In America, free of being bound to the land or to a hereditary occupation, you can chart your own path, limited only by your own ambition.

It’s an honorable, and even revolutionary, goal.

So it was that Americans moved from one room shacks to more durable cabins, to ranches to georgians and split levels and colonials as the centuries went by. From an outhouse in the yard to a bathroom with running water indoors, then two or even two and a half bathrooms in the typical suburban home by the late 20th century.

From cooking on the same stove that heated the house, to having a separate built-in oven, with broiler, and range top, and then a separate microwave and countertop oven as well. From an entire family sharing a single room, to every child having his own room. From a dirt floor to hardwood, then to tile, laminate or carpeting. From no basement at all to a storage cellar to a fully finished basement (in the north, at least), all here in this New World, in one of Western Civilization’s newest nations.

Politicians used to talk about this sort of thing. Our standard of living – both cumulative and personal – was a prominent subject in political campaigns. What can we do to raise our standard of living? How can we help more people afford a better life? What can the government do to enable more entrepreneurship, more successful careers, more personal and professional success, to bring prosperity to our families and communities?

The answer, of course, was usually “Just stay out of the way.” But over the years, government forgot that answer.

They don’t talk about prosperity so much anymore, do they? Politicians talk more about encouraging recycling, and supporting abortion, and sheltering more illegal aliens, and facilitating trans surgeries, and banning petroleum, and building windmills.

Anything but our standard of living. Wonder why?

Well, we should know this already, but it’s interesting that it doesn’t get discussed out loud: it’s because those who pay attention to the statistics are seeing a disturbing truth: the American Dream is becoming harder and harder to achieve. In fact, we’re going backward. Rather than each generation doing a little better, each generation is now doing a little worse.

Bankrate, a national financial advice firm, released a study in June that’s getting some attention. In their view, the cost of home ownership has been skyrocketing at a rate well beyond workers’ wages. During the Biden-Harris regime, just to use a reasonable four-year period for comparison, they found that the non-mortgage costs of home ownership are 26% higher than in 2020.

This isn’t a study of housing prices and mortgage rates, by the way, though these have been skyrocketing too.

It’s the hidden costs that they’re looking at. Your homeowner’s insurance premium, your state and local property tax bill, your home maintenance costs.

Some of these vary widely from state to state, as the most Republican states have generally held the line on property taxes, for example, while the most Democrat states have seen property taxes climb. The homeowner sees some of these costs because he pays the bills directly; the renter may not notice the costs because the landlord pays them, so they’re buried in his rent. Either way, everybody’s housing costs are climbing (everybody, anyway, except the ones whose housing is funded by the government, like welfare recipients and illegal aliens).

The average household non-mortgage housing cost that Bankrate found in their study – the current number, after these 26% in increases in four years – is $18,118 per year for a typical single family home. What goes into all this?

The utilities that provide our natural gas and electricity have been forced to produce more output as the population climbs. Utilities are forced by the politicians who regulate them to shut down efficient nuclear and coal plants, while being forced to build ridiculously inefficient solar and wind farms. Result? Less dependability and higher costs for us.

The appliances that we depend on – our furnaces and water heaters, ovens and ranges, washers and dryers – are skyrocketing too. By design. Blatantly unconstitutional federal, state, and even local regulations have doubled the cost of many appliances by unnecessary and costly “efficiency” demands. So it doesn’t hit you every year, but the year you need a new furnace or a/c unit, it costs thousands more. It may look like normal inflation, but it won’t be. The homeowner probably won’t know that more than half this price increase is due to these outrageous mandates.

Then there’s the cost of remodeling and other improvements, when needed. Labor costs more than ever, in states that have doubled their minimum wage, often pricing some kinds of remodeling work out of range for many who could have afforded it a few years ago. Even where materials have only increased at the rate of inflation, the cost of labor has far outpaced it, due to government manipulation, causing every household project to cost far more than it used to.

Have you bought paint lately? “VOC standards” and related regulations, adopted by enough states to force manufacturers to comply, have more than doubled average costs of paint in just the past few years. You can’t opt out of it by going to a state that hasn’t joined the trend; when enough states lock arms against the manufacturing community like this, it becomes impractical for a company to continue to make the old, affordable version. They either meet the new blue-state standard, or they leave the market. The result is that a paint job, whether a room or a deck or the whole house, costs two to three times as much in materials alone as it would have a few years ago.

What else do we need for our homes? You need a wireless modem and an internet subscription. You need a laptop or tablet and a cellphone. If you expect television, the old days of five free VHF stations are long gone; now you can have hundreds, but oh, how you’ll pay.

And what do all these things cost? At a hundred dollars per month each, give or take, our cellphone bills and internet bills, our utilities and appliance repairs, our property taxes and home improvement costs all add up more than we’d ever think, because we don’t normally do that kind of addition every month. But when we do, we find that a thousand a month is $12,000 per year; two thousand a month is $24,000 per year.

The biggest discrepancy from person to person and from house to house is based on the state. Wise people in red states can’t believe anyone’s crazy enough to pay $10,000 a year in property taxes in Illinois or New York on a home that would have a $2000 tax bill in Alabama or Mississippi. But we do.

But these other issues are less regionally varied. The national furnace market is being made costlier by federal bureaucrats; energy rates are climbing nationwide because the assault on energy sources that work is a national trend.

As a result, our American standard of living is dropping, and fast. As these costs climb, fewer and fewer people can afford a single family home at all. More Americans will be stuck in apartments for more years, even for their whole lives.

What are the causes?

Part of it is the general inflation of the country as a whole, and part of it is just the bad luck that we all need computers now rather than typewriters like in the old days, and computers are just more expensive than typewriters.

But the vast majority of these costs, if we’re honest with ourselves, are the undeniable result of conscious, intentional decisions made by Democrat lawmakers – or by the Democrat bureaucrats in the agencies they’ve empowered specifically to implement Democrat policy.

The war on oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. The war on affordable housing materials. The war on affordable appliances. The war on affordable labor. Even a war on affordable paint.

It’s on the ballot, whether we see it written as clearly or not.

The Democratic Party has spent decades empowering state and federal EPAs and Departments of Energy to wage war on our very standard of living.

Their mandates can be reversed, and these destructive agencies can be reined in. We could regain the American Dream in America again.

But only if we clean house, not just in the next election, but in our local and county and state elections as well. We need to appreciate who our enemies are, at every level, and kick them out of our government buildings, before government housing is the only housing we ourselves can afford.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo