the american dream is dead... this is why people are leaving the US.

I should leave America, it's too expensive, it's too dangerous if our economy is doing so well, how come everyone is bankrupt? like everything is going up besides our paycheck the

american

dream

is pretty much

dead

so it's not completely

dead

but it's dead in the way we knew it growing up if you take the exact same steps your parents took to try to achieve the American

dream

. If you dream that you probably won't make it, the results will be very different and today we're going to talk about how I think the American dream is dead and how it's still alive because I think it's still possible, but you have to do things differently. to what our society tells you if you want to get there, so we are all familiar with the American dream.

It's the idea that everyone is on an equal footing if you really work. In America you can come here and buy a house with a white picket fence, a car, two kids and maybe a TV which was like the 50's and 60's version of the American dream and it was very possible back then on one income. . We were able to buy a house and a car and have kids and today you just couldn't do that. Humpher Yang is a financial Tiktocker and YouTuber and he made

this

video that paints a pretty good picture of what it was like back then compared to Now in 1960, the average American worker earned about $100 a year and the average house cost $11,900, which means the housing price-to-income ratio back then was 2.1, which means if you took 2.1 years of your full salary you could buy the median house, so in the '60s you just had more purchasing power with your money obviously salaries were lower $110,000 salaries relative to the cost of things were much better for the average person and now they aren't so

this

is what it looks like today that 10 salary of $10,000 today adjusted for inflation would be $100,000 let's say you're in California, the median home price here is $793,000 the median income isn't even $100,000, it's actually $78,000, so the purchasing power for a ratio of buying a home is obviously much worse it's like 10 to one a house costs 10 times your salary and this without mentioning everything else that has gone up in price everyone knows groceries in insurance, whether it's health or car insurance, gasoline, I have noticed everything I buy.

Now it is 20 to 30% more expensive than a few years ago, but they don't pay me more. I actually make less, but I'm a YouTuber, so there are a lot of ups and downs. I know for the average person. They don't actually pay me 20% to 30% more, so salaries don't keep up with inflation and the Fed doesn't want them to. They have even said they want to keep wage inflation low. It's not that we don't want salaries. we want strong wage increases, we just want them to be at a level that is consistent with 2% inflation and while 2% is a good target for inflation, it's not really fair to the average American because over the last four years the Inflation has increased a lot.

More than 2% can be seen before Covid, it used to increase around 2% a year, maybe even a little less than it jumped to 3.9, 6% or even 10% and although it has slowed to 2%, that It doesn't mean that the prices have gone down, it means that inflation has slowed down a little and in total since 2019, food prices are now 27% higher than they were, everything is more expensive, but the Salaries are not rising, so we are really seeing the middle class being squeezed. right now in a way we haven't done in a long time. I know there was a contraction of the middle class in the '80s, there was a lot of inflation at the time and new economic policies that we'll talk about later, but right now we're seeing again a very dramatic contraction that we've never really noticed in my lifetime. , as if he had always been aware that inflation was 2% per year, not 10% per year.

One year, housing prices in major cities rose about 20% and have fallen a little, but overall they are still much more expensive and salaries have not recovered. It's interesting to see what the cost of everything else was even in 1960-1950, so let's take a look at this, everything was much less expensive even when we adjusted it for inflation, so adjusted for inflation, these are the numbers, you can seeing that a new house was $174,000 as if you weren't already buying a new house for $174,000 almost anywhere in America. The estimated average income for inflation was 69,000, so there was still a 2:1 purchasing power ratio.

Some of these things are similar to now, like eggs are $4, which is very similar to today's latte. Why was coffee so expensive back then, but basic necessities were? much more affordable and one thing I really want to highlight here is that back then you could do this with an average job, even a below average job. I'm pretty sure we're talking about factory workers. I found this record of what

people

did in 1969 and you can see that even farm workers and

people

who worked in a mine were earning at that time what a middle class life could afford, but today we find ourselves in a position where which even essential jobs are being eliminated. the middle class there are a lot of jobs that we need people to do well teachers fired police officers ERS these types of jobs today don't pay enough let's look at an essential job I would say it's kind of a normal job like that A lot of people has a firefighter as an example, a job we need people to do, since the national average in 2011 was $45,000. 11 years later, we can see that the average annual salary is now $56,000, so in 10 years salaries have not increased that much. but in the meantime, in that time housing prices have essentially doubled in many places, let's say you're a firefighter in Los Angeles, where I live at the highest level, you could make between $90 and $100,000 a year, so That's not the average of what I found. that's like a more experienced firefighter and if you want to buy a starter home in Los Angeles, it would be $1.25 million, that would be in the valley, not even in the most central part of Los Angeles, in 2011 it was only $700,000, but today Today there are 1.25 million. it has almost doubled, its price has increased significantly to the point that a firefighter wouldn't have to buy this house now and also I just want to point out that this house looks like it could use some major work, it is definitely quite old, probably 80 years old.

At least I'm not even talking aesthetically, I'm talking functionally about those old houses that almost always need something. What I mean here is that a firefighter's salary has only increased $1,000 $15,000 on average, but home prices have almost increased. doubled and houses are not the only thing that has happened to you to qualify to buy that house, you will most likely need to earn around $200,000 a year to know that they could earn a dual income, but if you have student loans or any other debt would be very difficult what we are seeing is that the American dream is dead if you have a normal job, a 9 to 5 job, you can definitely still get by with these jobs as a single person you would probably need to have roommates, but when try to buy a house, a car, kids, have some extra money, you just can't.

I just 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 not the American dream, although the idea is that you can get there on your own merit, but that is no longer the case, although it never was, when you think about it in many cases, but now it is Really, really not . I will say that if you're a double income working in tech, if you're working at Google Snap Meta, you're probably doing fine and I would consider a normal job to be 9 to 5.

You know they get paid enough to live on. and let's not demonize those people, they get paid what like everyone else, honestly should be good, is good, but even some above average jobs, like a lawyer or a doctor, nowadays are jobs that require a lot of education . I think these are also the places where Americans The dream is dead if you don't have generational wealth and I say that because the amount of debt you have to take on to get one of these high paying jobs makes it almost a wash now that I'm a doctor married to another. doctor and this person says that everyone has some money on average.

A Caribbean medical student, depending on what school they go to, could be between $350 and $450,000 in debt after all the interest and stuff, you could do the math, my wife and I are. somewhere around a million dollars in medical school debt, people come out of medical school with around $500,000 in debt, you have to go into so much debt to get there it's almost not worth it. I think it's still worth it in the long run. you make a lot more than you used to and the thing is with a doctor once you get 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 Even you're out of residency, you're not even making that much, but you're spending 10 years of time where you could be building wealth, but it's not your compound interest that you owe and some majors don't actually pay that well.

I know that a pediatrician on average doesn't make the same as a surgeon, in that case it just doesn't seem worth it, there are plenty of other jobs that would pay $200,000 a year that don't require 10 grueling years of work. your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Same with law school. Law school is also very expensive and exhausting. You can't have a job at the same time, so you're going into so much debt that, again, you just don't. I really don't think it's worth it, maybe it would be better to find a way to make money right out of high school and invest that money early on, given average salaries, the cost of student loans, and that they both start at 18 years.

At age 28, the plumber will have a net worth of $450,000 and the doctor will have a negative net worth of $250,000. 10 years later, at age 38, the plumber will have $1.6 million and the doctor will have $1.2 million. It is not until he is 41 years old that the Doctor's net worth finally surpasses plumber's, are you surprised? So most jobs, even the really good ones, just don't seem worth it, so it seems okay, who can afford this? You still like what's happening because people are still buying houses, who is buying these? houses and I will tell you what is happening, they are people with generational wealth.

I think it's always been that way, but the income inequality we have now is much worse than before and makes an even bigger difference, so people aren't shouting this from the rooftops that's why you don't see it as much. I know people personally and I also know real estate agents who have told me that this is the case when they are buying a house as well. Their parents give them the money for the down payment because it is too expensive now with a normal job. You probably know people this is the case, but they are not.

You go and tell everyone, usually these same people who are going to get a down payment gift probably didn't have to take out student loans either, plus there's a big plus. There have been some studies that have already shown that 54% of Millennials who own a home received help from their parents and 80% of Gen Z have a big advantage in buying real estate if your parents are rich. I even know people whose parents didn't give them the money, they bought them the house in cash and made their kids pay them back and just the fact that they were able to buy it in cash made the offer much more competitive for others. people who don't have that advantage, like if you're not familiar with real estate, if you have a cash offer that's very attractive to sellers.

And so, people with rich parents often advance them the money to buy in cash or give them a down payment. There are many advantages to having parents with money, to be clear, my parents did not. All of this, I'm very lucky that YouTube has solved another reason why I think the middle class is dead in the normal sense that we're thinking of, as income inequality is much higher, so check this out . graph that you can see in the 80s, it used to be when we had a stronger middle class, most of the money was in the bottom 50% and then we saw that over time, now most of the money is in the 1% and the bottom 50% don't even have half of it, as you see in this graph, so when we look at what's happening, like why people can't afford things, this economic inequality is a big reason because in some ways it just kill the middle class.

We no longer have a strong middle class and many people still think that they are middle class.average when they aren't, while it's true that Biden would raise taxes a little for everyone, what they don't see is that Trump's tax cuts were actually the highest for corporations, aka the richest people. Trump's tax cuts for individuals were 1 to 4%. The biggest tax cut was for corporations. They got a 14% cut. They were also able to get a 100% bonus depreciation. certain things, also known as private jets, so people who own large corporations can claim that they didn't make money buying a private jet and many companies do this, it doesn't have to be a private jet, it can actually be several different things, but This is how companies like Amazon and Nike end up paying almost nothing in federal taxes.

Nike was also found to have offshore accounts in Bermuda and Trump's tax cut made it easier to get away with it. Many people blame the increase. income inequality in Reaganomics, so in the 80s when Reagan was president, he gave a lot of tax cuts to the rich at that time, although the taxes were 70% as the highest tax rate and he reduced it to 50% , so we are still much lower than even that Reagan's economic policy was called supply side economics and the idea was that it would make industries more productive and efficient and that the additional money generated would reach the middle class , but it didn't really reach the middle class because what happens when rich people make money they reinvest it in buying back real estate shares, they don't just go and give people a raise out of the goodness of their heart, most of it of time they simply give people what they need. getting them to do the work even though we are more productive than ever, we have a lot more technology now, most of that accumulated wealth goes to the top 1%, it doesn't really end up trickling down as much, you know how? very few companies control entire markets, that's because of Ronald Reagan and the growing wealth gap that he also participated in during his first year, he instituted across-the-board tax cuts that primarily benefited corporations and wealthy Americans that same year in 1981, a modified antitrust system. laws that almost completely eliminate section two of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits monopolizing or attempting to monopolize any part of trade or commerce.

Author David Day stated that the antitrust theory that began with Rean has led us to a period of unparalleled market concentration. From the guild era at the top, I'll link to that Tik Tok below because it really quickly explains what Rean did and what's really interesting is that we now have data on how this has affected us, so this is from 1950 to 1980, like this than before. Let's go back and you can see that wages grew steadily with GDP growth and that the bottom 90% were growing at a similar rate to the top 10% and this was during and after Reagan, as you can see, the 1%. superior went crazy at the top.

The 01% have most of the wealth, while the bottom 90% have barely any of it. That's when we saw that although GDP was growing, companies were still making more money, wages were not increasing steadily like before. If you're in a job where you rely on an annual salary, you're not seeing a raise that you know the person who owns the company is seeing. Not really an expert on ronom, but I've seen a few videos on 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 point to it as one of the main reasons why we now have more income in quality, as well that from what I have deduced that this is what killed the middle class and that is how we got here.

Another thing that really comes into play is the rising cost of education. Almost all jobs require a college degree and it's not cheap to get there. doing the four year school route and even an average school can cost like $30,000 a year for an average state school. I found an example: Washington State University, it's the state school that's in the middle of nowhere, so it should be really cheap to live. but for 1 year it costs $33,000, so 4 years at this school you have to take out $120,000 to go there, that seems crazy, but I think the problem is that a college degree doesn't even have that much weight anymore, it seems. like it's just a basic requirement, like high school was back in the day, so it's not like it's going to give you a much better job, it's just going to give you a starting job.

I think what we're seeing now is people. They're graduating high school, they're going out and taking out so much money on student loans that they might even think about buying a house. Co was also one of the main causes of everything going up in price, so the jump from 2019 to now has been very dramatic and I think we are reaching the breaking point and that is why we see so many people talking about it, because at what point people just can't afford any of this stuff? There was a lot of inflation during covid and also a lot of corporations. greed, we now know from companies earnings calls that they said it was inflation when in reality they are just raising the price because they could or maybe initially it was a supply chain issue but then they never lowered the price again .

This article found that even if the cost of inputs to the producer only increased by 1%, they still increased the price to customers by 3-4% and although costs have now gone down, they have not passed on those savings, as I feel like all the companies raised their prices just because they could, but we're reaching a breaking point where these companies are going to make money because no one is going to buy anything because Jeff Bezos just has all the money. It's probably been a bit depressing to realize this. This is all good, but there is still hope.

Well, I think it's important to know all this because many people are still planning their lives and doing everything as if we have the advantages that the Boomers had financially when we don't. that same purchasing power or affordability. I think you just can't achieve the American dream with a regular job that's a W2 job with a salary unless maybe you're working in tech or your parents are rich and you know they can do it. subsidize your life, but the new American Dream, the new way to achieve it, is to own your own company, own your own business or leave the US, so let's start with the option of

leaving

the US I'm not saying this is what you should do.

I'm just saying I'm seeing a trend of people doing this. I have seen people leave the United States to go to Europe in Mexico. Europe is still quite expensive but more affordable than the United States. There is a financial YouTuber, Rose Han, who she actually moved on to. Mexico City and she has a better life there, she really does. She was able to buy a place, everything is less expensive. Well, the elephant in the room here is that this is not a good trend for people native to Mexico City, so I. I'm not saying we do this because I don't think it's sustainable.

I understand why people do it, but I think in many ways it's not fair to people who live in Mexico because it will just increase the cost of living there, but I don't have the benefit of American salaries that a digital nomad has, so that it's not fair to bring our problems there, so it's something people are doing, although it's the first time I've seen it because you get more. for their money there and then with Europe, in fact I have seen a couple on YouTube who decided to retire there because health care was too expensive in the United States.

We left the United States in 2017 and our only regret is not

leaving

sooner. Europe is still pretty expensive in many places, but CNBC made a video about this girl who bought a house in Italy and is living large there. I paid $662,000 for this house. All renovation costs are $21,000. I can go shopping here and spend 60 years, it's not possible. I can walk into a Publix in the United States and not spend more than $100. Here we have a whole chicken cut into pieces for €2. In fact, I recently had coffee with a British YouTuber who was in Los Angeles and she was telling me that she was surprised. how expensive food is here because in the UK it's nothing like that.

I even realized this because I went to Switzerland two different times, once in 2018 and once last year. I remember being shocked in 2018 at how expensive everything was. Starbucks there, the food, everything was much more expensive than in the United States and then when I went last year I thought these prices are about American prices, they are actually more or less the same, some things are cheaper, skiing It's cheaper there, I thought. It's kind of like the most expensive country in the world, that's crazy, so that's something people are doing: they're leaving the US. It's pretty ironic that it's now easier to achieve the American dream outside. of the United States in many countries. cases and this is not to mention the people who come here with nothing and without any advantages, it is much more difficult for them.

What I'm mainly talking about in this video is people who grew up middle class and are having a hard time making it. middle class in adulthood, the second, like I talked about owning your own business, I mean, the big problem is that wages have remained stagnant, but if you own your own business, you actually have the opportunity to earn a lot money. I'm not saying it's easy, it's actually very difficult as most businesses fail, but this is the opportunity for people to make a lot of money. Now there are a lot of companies. Small businesses where people make a lot of money.

You can be an individual entrepreneur or have a small business. and still earn much more than you would at a 9 to 5 job, you can even leverage your 9 to 5 job into a side business that turns into a business that could make more than you ever earned at your job. 9 to 5. I have seen some examples of nurses starting their own mobile IV company when you have your own company and can charge more. There are nurses who start their own medical spas and end up making a ton of money, teachers, even me. I have seen other teachers sell their coursework, their lesson plans online and that is how they have made money.

Hi, I'm Ally. I make more money selling my online teaching resources than teaching or there are teachers who make YouTube videos teaching. things I mean, that's how the Oli OB doll actually started, isn't it? There are plenty of what would be considered blue collar jobs that actually make a lot of money. I know plumbers, when I have a sewing viewer, it costs like $500 and doesn't take more than 2 hours, you can do several of them a day and own your own plumbing business, you might see stats of plumbers making this amount per year, but when you own your own plumbing business or general contractors who own their own business.

They are actually making a lot of money. In fact, I recently had to hire a plumber for something that went wrong at my house and the subtotal was $1,700. The cost of the part I searched for was $500, so they were able to make a profit of $1,178 on something. that, on average, takes 2 to 3 hours. I'm not sure how long this took because I wasn't in town for it, but no, it definitely didn't take more than a day based on their troubleshooting rate, it seems. like they are charging $300 an hour, the entire real estate industry is in a place where there is a lot of money to be made. per day and you have a package that costs between $500 and $1,000, you send everything for editing to a college student, you pay him like $20 an hour and you make at least 1,500 per day, doing that, if you have that many clients, there are countless ways to do it. learn new skills that you can turn into a side job that can turn into a new business where you were earning more than ever from 9 to 5 and I know it's not fair that our generation has 9 to 5 needs and a side hustle to do what that our parents could do with just a 9 to 5.

I know, but that's the reality, that's how it is now, but there are still opportunities if you're looking for them, I mean property managers. I see it everywhere. I see small ones. businesses where people are destroying. I also want to point out that being in the United States you have the advantage that anyone can start a business. That's not true. Everywhere there are many places in the world where it is much more complicated to start a business and you can't just start one the way you can in the United States. You also have the advantage that most American citizens have more money than other parts of the world.

The best example is making YouTube videos when my viewers are in the United States. my RPM is closer to $10 but in this video where they were mostly in India I only got 36 cents per 1,000 views in a 9 to 5, a lot of times you hit a limit at a certain point and you don't have to 9 to 5 and a side job forever MeI'd say the smart thing to do is to use a side job as a way to test out what could become your next main business. I think now that's the best 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 boom generation because if you're starting your own business you don't know for sure if it's going to be successful, so I think it's a side job.

For starters, it's good, in addition to a 9 to 5 schedule, another thing to talk 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 just because. that worked for me, but I was already doing YouTube for about six years by the time I could do it full time. I think more realistically, more people should consider Community College and then end up at a state school and just find their way. make it as cheap as possible, since community colleges really aren't that expensive.

I went to Aity College at the time, it was like $3,000 a year, maybe if that 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 don't come from a wealthy generation, I recommend doing something like that instead of going the full four-year college route. I know that sucks because college seems fun, but is it worth the loans? 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 really matter much where you are.

You got your degree if you go to a community college for 2 years and then transfer to another school like you don't. You'll even know that it's a much cheaper way to do it, which is an easy way to reduce that cost by 50%, which is the new American dream, which is why I think the American dream is dead in the way we all knew it growing up. I think it's very important to know this because if you live your life like our parents' generation did, you probably won't be able to afford those things unless they help you, so we have to do it.

Be realistic about what you are going through, it's like you feel like a lie, now you won't be able to do it with that normal 9 to 5 job. Everyone, please comment below your experience, like what kind of job you have. is enough to cover your expenses, have you noticed that salaries remain stagnant? What is your experience in recent years? I'm dying to know, let's have a discussion in the comments and I'll see you in the next video, bye.