The coverage appeared on CNN on June 5, 2012:
“A majority of Americans worry about their children achieving the American dream.
“A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows that nearly 6 in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the opportunity for the next generation to live better than their parents.
“It’s a sad commentary on the state of our country: parents have always dreamed of a brighter future for their children than what they had.
“Perhaps not anymore.
“The reality is many of us may wind up working longer, and retiring later, than anticipated.”
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase.
We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the contenders for the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.
Therefore, our leaders need to adopt a pragmatic approach to compromise and problem solving if we are to put our nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice.
