What Does American Prosperity Really Look Like?
Someone I know — she’s around my parents’ age — recently shared a post from a 26-year-old MBA student. That’s about a 40-year age difference. The student believes her generation is blind to American prosperity, so she wrote about it from a coffee shop, noting that people have smartphones, food, cars, and Amazon Prime. In her post, she concluded that young Americans are simply “entitled,” “ungrateful,” and don’t understand how good “we” have it. The person I know shared it five years after the student originally posted it, which says to me that it still resonates with people.
Here it is:
The image that accompanied this post was a headshot of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the progressive senator from New York. Why has stability become a political issue? I’ll never understand it, but I hear this argument a lot. And while I understand the perspective — which obviously resonates across generations — I want to offer a gentle (but firm) counter.
Because here’s the thing: we are not blind to prosperity. We’re surrounded by it — and we’re excluded from it.
Yes, we have technology. We have next-day shipping and overpriced lattes. I’m grateful for every privilege I possess. But we also have 38 million Americans living in poverty. Over 600,000 people sleeping in shelters, on sidewalks, or in their cars. One in five children in the richest country on Earth doesn't know where their next meal is coming from.
Are they “unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful”?
No. We’re not ungrateful. We’re exhausted. Even those of us that live with these American privileges have seen our fair share of the struggle.
We’ve lived through the 2008 collapse. We’ve watched student debt balloon past $1.7 trillion. We’ve seen housing become so unaffordable that whole generations of Americans will never own a home. We’ve seen wages stagnate while billionaires send themselves to space.
This isn’t entitlement. It’s clarity.
And here's what clarity reveals: prosperity should never be measured by Amazon delivery times. It should be measured by how many of us have what we need to thrive.
So I offer an alternative vision — one rooted in equity, compassion, and shared prosperity:
Require every K–12 school to teach real financial literacy — not just budgeting, but how systems work: taxes, credit, labor rights, economic justice, civic power.
Tax the billionaires. A modest 4% on the top 0.1% could erase student debt, cover insulin and EpiPens, fund the NEA, and help close the racial wealth gap.
Close tax loopholes that allow corporations like Amazon to pay $0 in taxes. Implement a global minimum corporate tax so companies can't just offshore their profits. These taxes could also pay for:
Provide Universal Basic Income to anyone making under $50k a year. Trials in places like Stockton, CA prove that people don’t stop working — they just live better.
Treat housing as a human right. Fund social housing like Vienna. Create a Federal Job Guarantee in caregiving, climate, infrastructure, and the arts.
Support worker cooperatives, break up monopolies, invest in land trusts and mutual aid.
Tax the polluters and reinvest in the people.
I believe that if we do these things, nobody — not even the MBA student in the Nokomis, Florida coffee shop — can accuse anyone of being ungrateful.
There’s so much we could do — if we stopped pretending everything is fine just because some of us are comfortable.
To me, American prosperity doesn’t mean a few people have everything. It means all of us having enough. Not just to survive, but to truly live.
We don’t have an entitlement problem. We have a compassion problem.
And the cure, I believe, is investment — not in the markets, but in each other. Wouldn’t that be a truer expression of American prosperity? Of humanity?
What about you? How do you define prosperity? And more importantly: who do you want it to include?