The AMERICAN DREAM
Is comfortable living almost a universal dream?
For Euro-Americans in Ben Franklin's times when Early Americans (so-called "Indians") were dying from European violence and diseases, PLENTIFUL LAND rewarded military service, land-grant education, land-grant railroads and industrial expansion. Plentiful land fueled an orgasm of European-American dreams.
But, as U.S. populations outgrow fixed lands and resources, is maintaining freedoms and lifestyles necessary to support good democratic government becoming harder?
U.S. federal spending has long budgeted "discretionary spending" for military & border defense, education, Pell grants & K-12, science, health, environmental goals, etc.
"Between 1973 and 2023, discretionary spending’s budgetary share fell from 53 percent to 28 percent of total federal spending."
https://www.cato.org/blog/fast-facts-about-discretionary-spending
Are momentarily-Great Societies brought down as people outnumber what government can afford? Are freedoms lost as people outnumber what resources can support and government can afford?
Nixon's 1969 address to Congress calling for a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future drew important conclusions.
"One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has overcome so many during the long march of civilization.
"When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth. Let us act in such a way that those who come after us ... can do so with pride in the planet on which they live, with gratitude to those who lived on it in the past, and with continuing confidence in its future."
Well, that ship sailed. (Adams Russell A Letter to Dear Children: On Our Overpopulation-Violence Connection p. 464).
U.S. government spending can't keep up as people from all sources increasingly outnumber what government and the American Dream can afford.
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