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The Federal Reserve Just Declared the American Dream Is Officially Dead For Most Of America

We all know what comedian George Carlin said about the American Dream: that you have to be asleep to believe it.

Well, now the Federal Reserve is agreeing with him.

In a new study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, they admit the so-called American Dream is now largely an impossible goal for a majority of the country.

In other words, the American Dream is officially dead.

In the study, Stanford economist Raj Chetty measured, “the probability that a child born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution makes the leap all the way to the top fifth of the income distribution.”

Chetty concluded that American children have a whopping 7.5% chance on average of actually achieving the American Dream in America.

Sure, a chance is still a chance, but that’s a really low chance.

As it turns out, Americans who actually want to achieve “the dream” would have a better chance of doing so in Canada (13.5%), Denmark (11.7%), or even the UK (9%) than here in the US.

So Americans would basically have almost twice the chances of achieving the American Dream in Canada, making it the Canadian Dream.

But 7.5% is just the average, mind you. That factors in super wealthy neighborhoods. When you get down into the major cities where the majority of people live, 7.5% looks more like a cruel, unachievable joke.

“In the city of Baltimore, you unfortunately have only a 3.5 percent chance of making that leap from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. That compares with 4.7 percent in D.C.”

Of course, your chances are higher if you are a child graced with the luck of being born in a predominantly wealthy, suburban neighborhood, but come on everybody knew that already.

It’s just “rich” to hear the Federal Reserve officially admit the American Dream is dead, that’s all.

Contributed by Piper McGowin

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