Cars 2

It's been a little over a month since my last blog entry on the American Dream, and not much has changed on my end. I still appreciate the idea that you can achieve success simply by working hard and I think it's a good thing that our country has collectively decided to give such an important value so much lip service.

But there are some damaging effects too. When people conclude that working hard equals success and not working hard equals not success, the obvious conclusion is that poor people are poor because they're lazy and rich people are rich because they're driven. And that would be the case in a perfect meritocracy. The unfortunate truth is that we don't live in a perfect meritocracy.

So you end up with a lot of people who work hard and some people "make it" but most don't, and that divides people pretty quickly. Many of the people who "make it" conclude that they have something - brains, discipline, great hair - that the poor people don't. You'll hear politicians talk about it all the time. John Boehner went onto 60 Minutes a few years ago and cried while he talked about how he worked his way up from being a janitor. The theme of the latest RNC was "We Built It". In reference to the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal income tax, Mitt Romney said "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The implication is that these people - almost half the country - don't end up paying income tax because they're inferior, and therefore we shouldn't worry about them. That's an awful way of looking at the world, and it's enabled by the belief that if poor people would just work harder they'd be more successful.