A recent poll from the Wall Street Journal indicates that 36% of Americans believe the “American Dream” is still possible — a drop of more than 20% in the last 10 years. Fox News’ “The Big Money Show” cohost Jackie DeAngelis joined “Fox and Friends” on Saturday to discuss the trend, laying the blame squarely at President Joe Biden’s feet.
“More and more people feel that way, because of the reckless spending from this administration, the inflation that’s pushed prices up 17% compounded since Biden has been in office,” DeAngelis said.
“So what’s happening? Their savings is dwindling,” she continued. “Right? They’re spending more money on things that they need. They’re getting less for their money, and more people are living paycheck to paycheck. You’ve got credit card debt that topped a trillion dollars. That is a new record.”
DeAngelis added, “I lay the blame on basically the policies that we’ve been seeing instituted here,” calling the economy under President Trump “pretty good” — while admitting, “If you didn’t like him as a person, if you didn’t like the tweets, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation.”
This feeling among voters comes while the economy is technically doing well, with strong economic indicators. But at the same time, interest rates are high and people are dealing with higher prices following a period of significant inflation. As the Washington Post put it earlier this month, “Biden’s economy is booming, but voters are unhappy.”
The Fox News host who jokingly apologized for being the “Financial Grim Reaper” described the American dream, saying, “You want to get married, you want to maybe move to the suburbs. You want to have kids, put your kids through school, you want to be able to go on vacation a few times a year.”
She added that, unfortunately, “more young people are saying, ‘I’ll never be able to own a home. I don’t have the money for the down payment. And I’m not going to be able to make the payment with mortgage rates as high.’”
The hosts also discussed their belief that President Biden is pushing a “socialist sort of, kind of society” on Americans. DeAngelis said the administration’s idea is “that we have collective success and we have collective wealth, and you don’t build personal wealth and you don’t need that to consider yourself successful.”
“So to a certain degree, they’re getting kids used to living like this now, so that the old American Dream that the Boomers had is no longer the dream anymore,” she added. “People will live paycheck to paycheck, they’ll rely on the government pretty much for everything they need, and then the government gets a lot of power over you.”
The Wall Street Journal noted that 53% of Americans believed the American Dream was still possible in 2012 and 48% in 2016. Additionally, half of the voters polled believe “life in America is worse than it was 50 years ago.”
