The American Dream Project

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Breaking news about the American Dream Project, podcasts and updates. The American Dream Project is a national educational initiative and a community of change leaders designed to re-ignite the real American Dream.

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What is the real American Dream?

The American Dream is to create a society that presents the greatest opportunity for happiness and least avoidable suffering possible. It is the realization that liberty is not simply an absence of laws and regulations, but rather it is a system of laws and regulations that promotes the common good for us.

"I believe that the American Dream has little to do with money. The dream is not so much materialistic as it is spiritual. By that I mean the promise of America is the promise of an equal chance to make something of our lives. The freedom and responsibility to give our gifts and express our most noble desires. If that sounds corny, maybe it’s because we’ve become so cynical. That’s a shame. Our founders were anything but cynical. They were perhaps the greatest group of practical-idealists in history."

"The higher ideal our founders fought for and is the premise of the real American Dream is a society in which our common responsibility is to help people we aren’t related to, don’t even know, or more importantly the unborn next generation. It was based on the inspired belief that the best society is one in which all of us help ensure that the most people have a full opportunity to achieve security, dignity and contentment. This is the vision that inspires me."

Dean Calbreath in an article in the San Diego Tribune reminds us that Jefferson and Madison were insistent that significant financial inequality not become life-as-usual in America. They were escaping a smothering aristocracy in Europe and England and they knew that if the wealthy interests controlled the government, the banks, and the land a new aristocracy would pass laws to insulate themselves from competition and protect their wealth and their children’s wealth in a thousand different ways that would cripple opportunity for the rest of us. Neither Jefferson nor Madison were socialists but as Calbreath reminds us, Jefferson proposed “taxes could be used to reduce enormous inequality,” and Madison proposed policies to limit “extreme wealth” and promote a broad middle class. Calbreath also points out that none other than Abraham Lincoln instituted America’s first income tax. It only taxed the more prosperous. And Teddy Roosevelt proposed a graduated income tax and inheritance tax. The motivation of these great presidents was not to punish the hard working, inventive risk-takers and reward the slackers; rather it was to use the taxes raised to create a civil society where the infrastructure of universal education, roads, bridges, and later power, water, and communication would reinforce the force of liberty for all of us to pursue our own American Dreams.