BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Confirmation Bias, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 23.1% saturation with 432 hits. Analysis detected 3,059 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,874 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 58.4% and a BS Rank of 63% (7,429 of 19,901 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 62.70% of the article peer group.
It’s the easiest line in American politics.
You hear it everywhere: The American Dream is dead.
Donald Trump declared in his 2015 presidential campaign launch speech that “sadly, the American Dream is dead.”
In his 2017 inaugural address it was replaced with “American carnage.”
Back on the trail in October 2024, he sharpened the point: “The American Dream for young people is gone.
They can’t buy a house.”
His opponent, Kamala Harris, agreed that the Dream was “out of reach.”
Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders warned upward mobility was “in peril.”
Republican Senator Tim Scott said homeownership was “further out of reach today than it was just a few years ago.”
Different parties, same premise.
That premise contains more than a grain of truth.
In today’s affordability crunch, a Gen Z professional can earn more than their parents did and still feel poorer once housing, childcare, insurance and transportation are taken into account.
Social media has turned gloomy comparisons into a 24-hour doomscroll.
The liberal and conservative press alike are addicted to selling despair from opposite ends of the spectrum.
But the obituary is selective.
Median household income rose from $53,657 in 2014 to $83,730 in 2024.
In that same period, the poverty rate fell from 14.8 percent to 10.6 percent.
Health insurance coverage improved, from 89.6 percent to 92 percent.
New business creation has more than doubled: 222,677 filings in February 2014, 443,944 in February 2024, and is still increasing, to 496,443 this past February.
That doesn’t make the Dream easy, but it means it’s still alive—if you know where to look.
This is what Newsweek’s American Dream Index is for.
We have scored every U.S.
ZIP code—33,772 of them—from 0 to 100 across six pillars: Economic Mobility, Housing Access, Employment Quality, New Business Formation, Education & Skills and Cost of Living.
Crucially, the index is weighted toward mobility: It asks not just whether a place is already rich, but whether ordinary people there can still climb.
Listen carefully, and there are voices who will tell you the same thing.
“The Dream is alive—follow the money and you’ll find it,” Anthony Scaramucci, financier and former Trump White House communications director, told Newsweek.
“Capital, talent and opportunity have migrated: out of legacy institutions and into the Sun Belt, the digital economy.
The Dream didn’t die; it changed its address.”
Maria Cardona, a Democratic political strategist and commentator and founder of Latinovations, agrees.
“The American Dream is still alive, but it has become much harder to achieve,” she told Newsweek.
“I believe the challenge is not that the Dream has disappeared, but that we have to make it more accessible again.
At the same time, it’s important to remain optimistic.
America’s best days are still ahead of us, and people need leaders who project hope, believe in the country’s future and are committed to creating more economic opportunity, so that everyone has a fair chance to achieve their version of the American Dream.”
Newsweek’s Dare To Dream project is not intended to be the last word on every single place.
The real world is more complicated than that.
Rather, it is intended to be a starting point for a conversation about opportunity.
States the Obituary Writers Forget If you had to predict the top of the Dream Index by state, you would likely get it wrong—and the way you’d get it wrong is part of the point.
The leaders of our Index are not the coasts.
North Dakota is first.
Utah and Minnesota follow.
Massachusetts—exactly the kind of state you’d expect to win—is only fourth, with South Dakota and New Hampshire trailing just behind it.
Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado and Iowa round out the top 10.
The Great Plains and the Mountain West, the part of the country least visible in coastal media coverage, sit at the very top of Newsweek’s list.
The reason why is what the Index is built to measure.
Because it leans on mobility rather than raw wealth, North Dakota’s near-full employment, its oil sector pumping real wages into real communities and houses that cost less than half what they do in Boston add up to a first-place finish.
Utah pairs some of the fastest job growth in the country with unusually strong intergenerational mobility.
South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska tell a similar story.
Unsurprisingly, the Northeast still scores well, with high-paid graduate clusters, venture capital, prestige hospitals and elite schools.
They help lift Massachusetts and its neighbors into the top 10.
But the region pays for them.
Its Housing Access and Cost of Living pillars are among the weakest in the country, and that is what keeps the Acela corridor out of the top three.
The bottom of the table is, sadly, more familiar.
Mississippi sits last, with Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, West Virginia and Arkansas just above it.
The Deep South’s generations-old structural disadvantages are visible across most of our six pillars, despite cheaper housing and low living costs.
Where the Dream Is Being Rewritten It’s the county-wide data that makes the American story truly come alive, though.
The top of the list is a combination few would predict.
Douglas County, Colorado, leads, just ahead of Loudoun, Virginia, and Morgan, Utah.
Then come places like Arlington and Fairfax in Northern Virginia—and, improbably, Edmunds County, South Dakota, and Sheridan County, Kansas, two rural Plains counties sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the richest suburbs in America.
Summit, Utah; Ozaukee, Wisconsin; and Teton, Wyoming, complete the top 10.
The Washington-to-Boston knowledge corridor and the Denver foothills, yes—but also small farm counties that quietly deliver on jobs, affordability and mobility.
Other interesting stories lie somewhere in the middle.
Take Madison County, Alabama.
It scores high, a reward for the paycheck that defense, space and manufacturing work bring home.
The Department of Defense and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spread aerospace contracts, alongside Toyota and Mazda’s joint plant.
Northwest Arkansas tells a similar story.
Benton County, the home of Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, is lifted by steady employment.
The Northwest Arkansas Council reports that the region added nearly 7,800 net new jobs in 2024, a 2.6 percent gain that tied for first among its peer metros, on top of a regional GDP of $33.3 billion.
There is still hope in rural communities, as Brian Reisinger, a farmer, author and rural policy expert, told Newsweek.
“The American Dream is very much alive, but it survives only if people continue to believe in it and fight to preserve it,” he said.
“Despite the challenges facing the country—from the decline of family farms to the struggles of rural communities—I still see resilience in people who keep working, starting businesses and finding new ways to build a better future.
That’s especially true in rural America, where families and entrepreneurs continue to hold on despite enormous pressures.
“I believe that spirit of perseverance is part of the country’s identity.
America still offers a level of opportunity that is difficult to find anywhere else in the world, where hard work, determination and a good idea can still change a family’s future within a generation.
As long as people continue to see and pursue those opportunities, the American Dream will endure.”
None of these places highlighted above is the wealthiest American suburb.
None is the cheapest American small town.
They are the working middle of the country, where the Dream is being rewritten, but they rarely get written about.
What’s Hiding Under the Average Some places are far stronger in one dimension than their overall score lets on.
The Bakken-Shale counties of North Dakota sit at the very top on Economic Mobility and Cost of Living: Billings County, Dunn and Mountrail are close behind.
Oil is not a fashionable employer, but it pays.
Of course, some places stand out for the quality of education on offer.
Clarke County, Georgia—home of the University of Georgia in Athens—scores highly on that measure.
Durham, North Carolina (Duke University), Albemarle, Virginia (the University of Virginia) and Oktibbeha, Mississippi (Mississippi State) do the same.
Manhattan and Atlanta’s Fulton County both stack elite universities and white-collar density into small areas.
Entrepreneurship is also a big driver.
Miami-Dade, Florida, is a hot spot of business creation in a metro area otherwise weighed down by housing and cost of living.
Kent County, Delaware, and rural Real County, Texas, show the same entrepreneurial surge.
And in Alaska’s remote boroughs—Denali, Aleutians East—seasonal industries pay real wages in hard places.
Entrepreneurship is part of America’s DNA, as Chelsea Follett, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity, argues.
“I’m optimistic that the American Dream is alive because many of the biggest obstacles to opportunity are the result of policy choices, and we can make better policy choices,” she told Newsweek.
“We can keep the American Dream alive by removing the obstacles to prosperity and the pursuit of happiness that are the result of poor policy choices.”
Others agree with that diagnosis, but perhaps have a different prescription.
“The American Dream is still alive because the United States remains a place where people can pursue opportunity, enjoy freedoms and build a better life than they could in much of the world,” Mike Madrid, the veteran Republican political commentator, told Newsweek.
“The country has real shortcomings, but it continues to represent hope for millions—from Americans born here to immigrants.
Immigrants, in particular, play a crucial role in keeping that dream alive because they have a firsthand understanding of what exists beyond America’s borders.
They remind the rest of us not to take those opportunities for granted and help renew the country’s founding belief that anyone can come here, work hard and pursue happiness.”
The Country We Actually Live In The American Dream is harder to finance than it should be.
Housing scarcity is a national failure.
Childcare is punishingly expensive.
Student debt shapes career decisions long after graduation.
Health care costs remain a source of chronic instability for tens of millions.
The places carrying the heaviest of these burdens—the Mississippi Delta, the high-cost coastal metros—are not random.
They are the result of decisions made and postponed, sometimes over generations.
But the Dream is not dead.
It can be found in Huntsville, Alabama, and Bentonville, Arkansas, and Greenville, South Carolina.
It is in Douglas County, Colorado, and Loudoun, Virginia, and the long suburban arc from Boston to Washington.
It is in the North Dakota oil towns and in the farm counties of the Plains that outscore famous suburbs.
It is, in muted form, even in many of the counties that score below the national median, where families build secure lives out of the spotlight.
It would be more honest to say that the Dream has narrowed and dispersed.
It’s less photogenic than it used to be, yet more attainable than the declinists allow.
Pew finds that 53 percent of Americans still believe it is possible for them, and UCLA researchers report that 86 percent of Americans under 27 still want to achieve it.
Most striking, Gallup and the Milken Institute reported this year that 76 percent of U.S. adults still agree the American Dream is achievable.
They are not deluded.
They are looking past the headlines.
The American Dream is still being written; you just have to know where to look.
Analysis
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