The American Dream is Dead… This is Why People are Leaving the US
In this video, we are delving into the harsh reality that the version of the American Dream that many of us grew up with is mostly dead. The traditional “American Dream” of owning a home with a white picket fence, a car, and two kids is no longer attainable for the average person. We are comparing what the average person could afford in the 1960s to what they can afford today, and the results are shocking.
Wages have not kept up with inflation, making it nearly impossible for the average person to achieve the American Dream with a normal or essential job. Even jobs such as firefighters, teachers, and police officers, which are essential to society, do not pay enough to afford a middle-class life in many areas.
Income inequality has become much worse, and COVID-19 has only exacerbated the situation with inflation and corporate greed driving up prices while wages remain stagnant. People are leaving the US in search of a better life and greater opportunities to achieve the American Dream.
But there is hope. Despite the challenges, there are still ways to succeed in the world today. People are making a lot more money from their own businesses, and there are alternative paths to achieving generational wealth that do not involve following the traditional steps laid out by previous generations.
The American Dream may be dead in the way we knew it growing up, but it is still possible to succeed. It just requires doing things differently than what our society tells us. As we enter the year 2024, it is important to recognize the challenges and find alternative ways to achieve success in a world where the traditional American Dream may no longer be attainable for the average person.
Watch the video by Shelby Church
I should leave the United States it is too expensive it is too dangerous if our economy is doing so great how come everyone is broke the wealthy are definitely under tax in the grocery store at the gas pump on the car lot prices keep Rising literally it feels
Like everything is going up besides our pay the American dream is pretty much dead so it’s not completely dead but it is dead in the Way That We Knew It growing up if you take the exact same steps that your parents did to try and achieve the American dream you’re
Probably not going to get there the results are going to be very different and today we’re going to talk all about how I think the American dream has died and in what ways it actually is still alive because I think it is still possible but you have to do things
Differently than what our society is telling you if you want to get there so we’re all familiar with the American dream right it’s this idea that everyone is kind of on a Level Playing Field if you work really hard in America you can come here and you can buy a house with a
White picket fence and a car and two kids and maybe a TV that was like the 1950s 1960s version of the American dream and it was very possible back then on one income people were able to buy a house and a car and have kids and today
You simply could not do that humpher Yang is a finance Tik tocker and YouTuber and he made this video that just Paints the picture really well of what it was like back then compared to now so back in 1960 the average US worker made about 56
$100 per year and the median house cost $11,900 that means the home price income ratio back then was 2.1 which means that if you took 2.1 years of your full wages and salary you were able to buy the median house so back in the’ 60s you just had more buying power with your
Money obviously the salaries were lower at $110,000 the wages relative to the cost of things was much better for the average person and now they are not so here’s what it looks like today that 10 $10,000 salary today adjusted for inflation would be $100,000 let’s say you’re in California the average home
Price here is $793,000 the median income isn’t even $100,000 it’s actually $78,000 so the buying power for for a home purchase ratio is obviously much worse it’s like a 10 to one a house costs 10 times your salary and this is not even to mention everything else that
Has gone up in price everybody knows groceries in Insurance whether health or car insurance gas I’ve noticed everything that I buy now is 20 to 30% more expensive than it was a few years ago but I’m not getting paid more I’m actually making less but I’m a YouTuber
So it’s very up and down I know for the average person you’re not really getting paid 20 to 30% more so the wages are not keeping up with inflation and the Federal Reserve doesn’t want them to they’ve even said they want to keep wage inflation down it’s it’s not that we
Don’t want wage increases we want strong wage increases we we just want them to be at a level that’s consistent with 2% inflation and while 2% is a good goal for inflation it’s not really fair to the average American because in the last four years inflation was up way more
Than 2% you can see back before covid it did used to rise about 2% a year maybe even a little less then it jumped to 3.9 6% even 10% and while it has slowed down to 2% that doesn’t mean the prices have gone down that means that the inflation
Has just slowed down a little bit and in total since 2019 food prices are now 27% higher than they were everything’s more expensive but wages are not going up so we are really seeing the middle class being squeezed right now in a way that we haven’t for a very long time I know
There was a squeeze of the middle class in the’80s there was a lot of inflation at that time and New Economic policies which we’ll get into later but right now we are seeing a very dramatic squeeze again that we really haven’t ever that I’ve noticed in my lifetime like I’ve
Always been aware of inflation being 2% a year not 10% a year one year home prices in major cities were up like 20% and they have gone down a bit but all in all still a lot more expensive and the wages have not caught up it’s
Interesting to look at what the cost of everything else was like even back in 1960 1950 so take a look at this everything was a lot less expensive even when we adjust it for inflation so adjusted for inflation this is the numbers you can see that a new house was
$174,000 like you’re not buying a new house for $174,000 hardly anywhere in America anymore the average income estimated for inflation was 69,000 so it was still that 2:1 buying power ratio some of these things are similar to now like eggs being $4 that is very similar to
Now milk coffee why was coffee so expensive back then but the basic necessities were a lot more affordable and one thing I really want to hit home here is back back in that time you could do this with a normal job even a below average job I’m pretty sure we’re
Talking Factory workers I found this record of what people made in 1969 and you can see even Farm laborers and people that worked in a mine were making for that time what could afford you a middle class life but today we’re finding ourselves in a position where even essential jobs are getting squeezed
Out of the middle class there are a ton of jobs that we need people to do right teachers police officers firef ERS these kinds of jobs today do not pay enough let’s take a look at an essential job I would say a kind of a normal job like
That a lot of people have a firefighter as an example a job that we need people to do like the average nationally in 2011 was $45,000 11 years later we can see the mean annual wage is now $56,000 so in 10 years the wages have not gone up that much but meanwhile in
That time housing prices have essentially doubled in a lot of places let’s say you’re a firefighter in Los Angeles where I live at the high end you could earn 90 to $100,000 a year so that is not the average from what I found that is like a more experienced
Firefighter and if you want to buy a starter home in La it would be $1.25 million that would be in the valley not even in the more central part of La back in 2011 it was only $700,000 but today at 1.25 million it’s almost doubled it’s increased in price
The significantly to the point that a firefighter would be priced out of buying this house now and also just I want to note this house looks like it would need major work it’s definitely pretty old it’s probably 80 years old at least I’m not even talking aesthetically I’m talking functionally those older
Houses they pretty much always need something the point I’m making here is the salary for a firefighter has only gone up what $1,000 $15,000 on average but the home prices have almost doubled and homes aren’t the only thing that that’s happened to to afford to qualify
To buy that house you would more likely need to make around $200,000 a year so you know dual income they could get there but if you have student loans or any other debt like it would be really hard what we’re seeing is the American
Dream is dead if you have a normal job a 9 to-5 job you can definitely still get by on these jobs as a single person you’d probably need to have roommates but when it comes to buying a house a car kids having some extra money it
Just you can’t I just I don’t know how you’re going to get there unless you have generational wealth which we’ll talk about later I think generational wealth is is not the American dream though the whole idea is that you can get there on your own Merit but not not
The case as much anymore it kind of never was though when you think about it in a lot of cases but now it’s really really not I will say if you are dual income working in Tech if you work at Google snap meta you’re probably doing
Just fine and I would consider that a normal job it’s a 9 to5 you know they’re getting paid enough to live and let’s not demonize those people they’re getting paid what like everyone else should be honestly like good it’s good but even some above average jobs like a
Lawyer or a doctor today jobs that require a lot of Education I think these are also where the American dream is dead if you don’t have generational wealth and I’m saying that because the amount of debt you have to take on to get one of these very high paying job
Makes it almost a wash now I’m a doctor married to another doctor and this person says so y’all have some money on average a Caribbean medical student depending on the school they go to could be anywhere from $350 to $450,000 in debt after all the interest
And stuff you could do the math my wife and I are somewhere around a million dollar in medical school debt people come out of medical school with a debt of around $500,000 you have to take out so much debt to get there that it’s almost not worth it I think in the long
Run it still is you have to take out a a lot more than you used to and the thing is with a doctor once you’re out of medical school you’re still not making a lot of money you’re making like $50 $60,000 a year maybe a little more now
30,000 till you’re out of residency you’re not even making that much yet you’re spending 10 years of time where you could be compounding wealth but you’re not your compounding interest that you owe and some Specialties don’t actually pay that well I know a pediatrician on average they’re not
Making what a surgeon is making in that case it just it doesn’t really seem worth it there’s a lot of other jobs that would pay $200,000 a year that don’t require 10 grueling years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt same thing with law
School law school is also very expensive and grueling you can’t really have a job at the same time so you’re getting into so much debt that again I just don’t really think it’s that worth it you might be better off just figuring out a way to make money right out of high
School and investing that money right out the gate given average salaries the cost of student loans and that they both start at 18 years old at age 28 the plumber will have a net worth of $450,000 and the doctor negative $250,000 10 years later at 38 the
Plumber will have $1.6 million and the doctor 1.2 million it’s not until the age of 41 does the doctor’s net worth finally passed that of the plumbers are you surprised so most jobs even the really good ones it’s like just doesn’t seem worth it so it seems like okay who
Is able to afford this all still like what is going on because people are still buying houses who who is buying these houses and I’ll tell you what’s going on it’s people with generational wealth I think it’s always kind of been like that but the income inequality that
We have now is so much worse than it was before that it makes even more of a difference so people aren’t shouting this from the rooftops that’s why you don’t really see it as much I know people personally and I also know real estate agents have who have told me this
Is the case also who when they’re going to buy a house their parents gift them the money for the down payment because it’s just too expensive now with a normal job you probably know people who this is the case but they’re not you know going and telling everyone usually
These same people who are going to get a gift for a down payment probably also didn’t have to take out student loans as well there’s a huge Advantage there there have been some studies that have already showed that 54% of Millennials that own a home had help from their
Parents and gen Z 80% you have a huge leg up to buy real estate if your parents are wealthy I even know people who their parents didn’t gift them the money but they bought the house for them in cash and they had their their child pay them back and just the fact that
They were able to buy it in cash made the offer a lot more competitive to other people who don’t have that Advantage like if you’re not familiar with real estate if you have an all cash offer that’s very appealing to Sellers and so people with wealthy parents a lot
Of the time they’ll front them the money to buy in cash or they’ll give them the down payment there’s just a lot of advantages to having parents with money to be clear my parents did not do any of this I’m just very fortunate that YouTube has worked out um another reason
I think that the middle class is dead in in the normal sense we’re thinking about it as is the income inequality is much higher so take a look at this chart you can see from the’80s it used to be when we had a stronger middle class most of
The money was with the bottom 50% and then we saw that over time just flip now most of the money is with the 1% and the bottom 50% doesn’t even have like half of it it looks like from this graph so when we look at what happens like why
Can people not afford things this economic inequality is a huge reason because it’s kind of just killed the middle class we really don’t have a strong middle class anymore and a lot of people think they are middle class still when they’re not The thing is though it is true that Biden would raise taxes a little bit for everyone but what they don’t see is that Trump’s tax cuts were actually the highest for corporations aka the wealthiest people Trump’s tax cuts for individuals was anywhere from 1 to 4% the biggest tax cut was for corporations
They got a 14% cut they were also able to get 100% bonus depreciation for certain things AKA private jets so people that owned large corporations could claim that they didn’t make any money by buying a private jet and a lot of companies do this it doesn’t have to
Be a private jet it can actually be a number of different things but this is how companies like Amazon and Nike end up paying almost nothing in federal taxes it was also found that Nike has offshore accounts in Bermuda and the Trump tax cut made it easier to get away
With this a lot of people blame the increased income inequality on Reaganomics so back in the ‘ 80s when Reagan was President he did give a lot of tax cuts to the rich at the time though the taxes were 70% as the highest tax rate and he brought it down to 50%
So we’re still a lot lower even than that Reagan’s Economic Policy was called supply side economic and the whole idea was that it would make Industries more productive and efficient and that additional money generated would trickle down to the middle class but it didn’t really trickle down to the middle class
Cuz what happens when wealthy people make money is they reinvest it in property stock buyback they’re not just going and giving people a raise out of the goodness of their heart a lot of the time they’re just going to give people like whatever they need to to get them
To do the job even though we’re more productive than ever we have so much more technology now most of that wealth accumulated from that goes to the top 1% it doesn’t really end up trickling down all that much you know how very few companies control entire markets that’s
Because of Ronald Reagan and the growing wealth Gap he had a hand in that too during his first year he instituted across theboard tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and Wealthy Americans that same year in 1981 rean altered Anti-Trust laws almost completely eliminating section two of the Sherman Antitrust Act which makes it
Against the law to monopolize or attempt to monopolize any part of trade or Commerce author David day claimed the antitrust theory that began with rean has brought us to a period of Market concentration unrivaled since the guilded age on top of I’ll link that Tik Tok down below because it really does
Quickly explain what rean did and the really cool thing is now we have data of how this has affected us so this is 1950 to 1980 so pre- rean and you can see that wages did grow steadily with GDP growth and the bottom 90% was growing at
A similar rate to the top 10% and this is during and post Reagan as you can see the top 1% went crazy in the top .01% has the greatest share of the wealth meanwhile the bottom 90% has barely any of it this is when we saw that even
Though GDP was growing so companies were still making more money wages were not going up steadily with that like they were before so if you’re at a job where you’re relying on an annual salary you’re not seeing an increase that you know that the person that owns the
Company is seeing ever really not an expert on ronom but I’ve watched some videos about it and I would definitely recommend going and checking it out if you’re interested in this kind of thing because a lot of people do point to that as one of the major reasons that we have
More income in a quality now so from what I’ve gathered this is kind of what killed the middle class and that is how we’ve gotten here another thing that really comes into play is the increased cost of Education almost every job requires a college degree and it’s not
Cheap to get there most people are doing the four-year school route and even an average school can be like $30,000 a year for an average state school I found one example Washington State University it is the state school that’s in the middle of of nowhere so it should be
Really cheap to live out there but for 1 year it’s $33,000 so 4 years at this school you’re having to take out $120,000 to go there that just seems crazy but I think the issue is a college degree just doesn’t even hold that much weight anymore it seems like it’s just a
Base requirement the way that high school was back in the day so it’s not like it’s going to get you that much better of a job it’s just going to get you a starter job I think what we’re seeing now is people are graduating high school school going and taking out so
Much money in student loans that they could even think about buying a house Co was also a major cause in everything going up in price so just the jump from 2019 to now alone has been very dramatic and I think we’re reaching the breaking point and that’s why we’re seeing so
Many more people talk about it because at what point can people just not afford any of this stuff there was a lot of inflation during covid and also a lot of corporate greed we know now based on earnings calls from companies that they they said it was inflation when really
They’re just raising the price because they could or maybe it initially was a supply chain issue but then they never lowered the price again this article found that even if the input cost for the producer only raised 1% they still Rose the price for customers 3 to 4% and
Even though now costs have come down they have not passed on that savings like I feel like every company increased their prices just for the hell of it just because they could but we’re reaching a breaking point where are these companies even going to make any money because no one’s going to be
Buying anything because Jeff Bezos just has all the money this has probably been kind of depressing to realize all of this right but there is still hope okay I think it’s important to know all of this though because a lot of people are still planning out their life and going
About everything as if we have the advantages that Boomers had economically when we do not have that same buying power or affordability at all I think you just cannot achieve the American dream with a normal job that is a W2 job with a salary unless maybe you’re
Working in Tech or if your parents are rich and you know they can kind of subsidize your life but the new American Dream the new way to actually achieve this it’s own your own company own your own business or leave the US so let’s start with the leaving the US option I’m
Not saying that this is what you should do I’m just saying I’m seeing a trend of people doing this I’ve seen people leave the us to go to Europe in Mexico Europe is still pretty expensive but more affordable than the us there is a finance YouTuber Rose Han she actually
Moved to Mexico City and she has a better life there she really does she was able to buy a place everything is less expensive okay the elephant in the room here though is that this is not a good trend for people that are native to
Mexico City so I’m not saying to do this because I don’t think it’s sustainable I see why people do it but I think in a lot of ways it’s not fair to people that live in Mexico because it’s just going to increase the cost of living there but
They don’t have the benefit of the US salaries that a digital Nomad has so it’s kind of not fair just like bringing our problems over there so it is something people are doing though like for the first time that I’ve seen because you get more for your money
There and then with Europe I’ve actually seen a couple on YouTube that decided to retire there because Healthcare was too expensive in America we left the United States in 2017 and our only regret is not leaving sooner Europe is pretty expensive still in a lot of places but
CNBC made a video about this girl who bought a home in Italy and is living large there I paid $662,000 for this home all in my renovation costs are $21,000 I may go grocery shopping here and spend 60 year old it’s no way I can walk in a Publix in the United States
And not spend over $100 here we have a whole chicken cut into pieces for €2 I actually got coffee recently with a British YouTuber who was in LA and she was telling me that she was shocked at how expensive groceries are here because back in the UK it’s like not nearly
Anything like that I even noticed this because I’ve gone to Switzerland two different times once in 2018 and once last year I remember in 2018 being shocked at how everything was so expensive Starbucks there the food everything was just so much more expensive than in in America and then
When I went last year I was like these prices are about American prices actually they’re about the same some things are cheaper skiing is cheaper there I was just like it’s kind of the same as the most expensive Ive country in the world now that’s crazy so that’s
One thing that people are doing they’re leaving the US it’s pretty ironic that now it’s easier to achieve the American dream outside of America in a lot of cases and this is not even to mention people that come here with nothing and have absolutely no Advantage it is it’s
So much harder for them what I’m mostly referring to in this video is people that grew up middle class are having a hard time achieving middle class in adulthood the second one like I talked about owning your own business I mean the the big issue is Wages have stayed
Stagnant but if you own your own business you actually have the opportunity to make a lot of money I’m not saying it’s easy it’s actually really hard like most businesses fail but this is the shot that people have at making a lot of money now there are a
Ton of businesses small businesses where people make a lot of money you can be a solo preneur or have a small business and still make a lot more than you would at a 9 to-5 job can even Leverage your 9 to-5 job into a side hustle that turns
Into a business that might make more than you ever did at your 9 to-5 job there’s a few examples I’ve seen of this nurses Who start their own mobile IV company when you have your own company and you can charge more there are nurses Who start their own Med spas and they
End up making a ton of money teachers even I’ve seen sell their course work their lesson plans online to other teachers and that’s the way that they’ve made money hey I’m Ally I make more money selling my teaching resources online then I do teaching or there are teachers who make YouTube videos
Teaching things I mean that’s kind of how Oli OB doll got started actually isn’t it there’s a ton of what would be considered Blue Collar jobs that actually make a lot of money I know plumbers when I’ve gotten a sew scope it’s like $500 and it does not take more
Than 2 hours you could do multiple of those a day and own your own Plumbing business you might see statistics of plumbers make this amount per year but when you own your own Plumbing business or general contractors that own their own business business they’re actually making a lot of money I actually
Recently had to hire a plumber for something that went wrong in my house and the subtotal was $1,700 the cost of the part that I looked up was $500 so they were able to profit $1,178 for something that on average takes 2 to 3 hours I’m not sure how long
It took on this because I wasn’t in town for it but I don’t it definitely didn’t take more than a day based on their troubleshooting rate it seems like they’re charging $300 an hour the whole real estate estate industry is somewhere where there’s a lot of money to be made
Real estate agents make a ton Real Estate photographers I mean $500 package for photos I actually met this guy who shoots about three houses a day and has a package that was like $500 to $1,000 sends everything to be edited to a college student he paid like $20 an hour
He’s making what at least 1,500 a day doing that if he has that many clients there are countless ways that you can learn new skills that you can turn into a side hustle that can turn into to a new business where you were making more
Than you ever did at a 9 to5 and I know it’s not fair that our generation has needs to have like a 9 to5 and a side hustle to make what our parents could with just a 9 to5 I know but that is the reality that is how it is now but there
Still is opportunity if you’re looking for it I mean property managers I I see it everywhere I see small businesses where people are killing it I also just want to note that being in America you have such an advantage in that anyone can start a business this is not true
True for everywhere there are a lot of places in the world where it’s much more complicated to start a business and you can’t just start one the way you can in America you also have an advantage in that most US citizens have more money than other parts of the world prime
Example is with making YouTube videos when my viewers are in the US my RPM is closer to $10 but this video where they were mostly in India I only got 36 cents per 1,000 views in a 9 to5 a lot of times you cap out at a certain point and
You don’t have to do a 9 to5 and a side hustle for forever I would say the smart thing to do is use a side hustle as a way to test out what could become your next main business I think now that’s the better way to go after achieving the
American dream than to get a lot of jobs unless it’s like in Tech it’s not easy and it’s not as guaranteed as it was for the boomer generation because if you’re starting your own business like you don’t know for sure if it’s going to succeed that’s why I think side hustle
To start is good like in addition to a 9 to5 another thing that needs to be talked about is making your student loan amount as small as possible I don’t know if it’s realistic for me to say just don’t go to college because yeah that worked out for me but I was already
Doing YouTube for like six years at the point that I was able to just do that fulltime I think more realistically more people should just consider Community College and then finishing at a state school and just finding the way to do it as cheap as possible like community
Colleges are are really not that expensive I went to aity college at that time it was like $3,000 a year maybe if that I also did a dual enrollment program in high school it was literally like $300 a quarter and I graduated with a ton of college credits so if you’re
Not coming from generational wealth I would highly recommend doing something like that rather than going the full four-year College route I know that kind of sucks though because like college seems fun but is it worth the loans like I personally didn’t think it was worth
It that’s why I didn’t do it at the end of the day once you’re in the workforce it doesn’t doesn’t really matter that much where you got your degree if you go to a community college for 2 years and then transfer to another school like no
One’s even going to know it’s a much cheaper way to do it that’s an easy way to reduce that cost by 50% that is the new American dream that is why I think the American dream is dead in the way that we all knew it growing up I think
This is so important to know because if you’re going about your life the way that our parents generation did you’re not going to be able to afford that stuff probably unless they’re helping you out and so we got got to be realistic about what’s going on it’s
Just like it feels like a lie now you’re not going to be able to do it with that normal 9 to-5 job everyone please comment down below your experience like what kind of job do you have is it enough to cover your expenses have you noticed wages stay stagnant what is your
Experience these last several years I’m dying to know let’s have a discussion in the comments and I will see you guys in the next video bye
Video “the american dream is dead… this is why people are leaving the US.” was uploaded on 02/18/2024. Watch all the latest Videos by Shelby Church on Gretopia