A Fair Shot

Why the American Dream Is Slipping Away — and What It Would Take to Restore It

A fair shot.
That’s all most people are asking for — a fair shot at the American Dream.

They aren’t asking to become billionaires or for free handouts. They’re asking for something far more modest: the ability to afford a home, raise a family, take an occasional vacation, and retire with dignity after a lifetime of honest work.

That promise once defined America.
It no longer does.

Today, inequality grows while wages stagnate. Poverty persists even among people who work full-time. Debt hangs over millions, waiting to trap anyone who gets sick, loses a job, or falls behind. CEOs now earn more in minutes than many workers will earn in their entire lives, and more than 750,000 Americans are homeless while over 15 million homes sit vacant — kept empty to preserve profits rather than house people.

This didn’t happen by accident.

Over decades, political decisions hollowed out labor power, rewrote tax rules to favor the wealthy, and turned basic necessities into profit centers. Culture wars were deliberately inflamed to distract from the reality that the economy increasingly works for those at the top — and against everyone else.

Instead of confronting that reality, we blame the poor for being poor. We scrutinize how someone spends six dollars in food assistance while ignoring rampant waste, fraud, and abuse in trillion-dollar budgets. We demand “personal responsibility” from workers while excusing corporate greed, monopoly power, and systemic exploitation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in how we spend our money.

In 2025, the U.S. defense budget was $850 billion. It rose to $1 trillion in 2026, and the president is now pushing for $1.5 trillion in 2027. Meanwhile, extending healthcare subsidies for 20 million Americans costs roughly $25 billion per year. Free school lunches for all children cost about $11 billion. Housing the homeless costs roughly $10 billion. A federal paid parental leave program would cost between $10 and $20 billion annually. Even fully free college tuition would cost around $75 billion per year.

Together, these programs cost less than the most recent defense budget increase — and only a fraction of what is now being proposed.

So when people ask, “How are we going to pay for it?” the honest answer is simple: with the budget we already have.

Budgets are moral documents. They reveal priorities. When a government cuts food assistance and healthcare, slashes taxes for billionaires, and expands military spending, it isn’t managing an inevitability — it’s making a choice.

We could dramatically reduce poverty, ensure healthcare for all, expand access to housing, and create real opportunity through education and job training today without spending more overall. Life does not need to be this hard.

There is nothing wrong with success. If you’ve made it, congratulations. But when a CEO increases their wealth by millions of dollars every hour while employees rely on food assistance to survive — and pay a higher effective tax rate than that CEO — something is deeply broken.

After working for forty years, Americans are told retirement must be delayed because Social Security is “running out of money.” Yet a firefighter pays a payroll tax rate dozens of times higher than a billionaire, while that billionaire deducts private jets and yachts as business expenses.

Corporations spent more than $400 million last year fighting unionization, while nearly half of all full-time workers still do not earn a livable wage. The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 — unchanged for fifteen years — as families are forced to rely on credit cards and buy-now-pay-later loans just to survive. Total credit-card debt now exceeds $1.1 trillion.

At the same time, corporations spend over $4 billion each year lobbying Congress — more than sixty times what is spent advocating for workers. That influence shapes policy, weakens enforcement, enables monopolies, and even eliminates public services. It’s why companies like H&R Block and TurboTax successfully lobbied to shut down a free government tax-filing system, forcing Americans to keep paying private firms to do something the government should provide in the first place.

This cannot continue.

The middle class is being hollowed out. The working class is surviving on debt and assistance. The economy is increasingly propped up by luxury consumption at the top rather than stability at the bottom.

The solution isn’t radical. It’s foundational.

A society that expects people to stand on their own must give them something solid to stand on. Fair wages for honest work. Public investments that expand opportunity instead of debt. Economic security that makes independence possible.

None of this requires drastic increases in spending. It requires choosing people over profit, stability over scarcity, and the future over short-term gain. The question isn’t whether we can afford to give everyone a fair shot — it’s whether we’re willing to.