The American Dream Isn’t Dead. The Baseline Is Too Low.

His daughters were playing Uno at the kitchen table, so Wilton Lemieux stepped outside.

What he needed to say was too heavy for a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader to hear.

He climbed into his car. Faded photos of his late grandmother and his girls covered the speedometer. He propped his phone on the steering wheel and started recording.

Wilton joined the Army at 17. He served in Afghanistan. Now he’s a single dad in Louisiana, and the math doesn’t add up. Twenty dollars used to fill half his tank. Now it fills a quarter. His $200-a-week budget can’t keep up. For four months straight, he’s dipped into his savings just to cover the basics.

He recorded the video again and again, until his voice matched what he felt inside. As the Washington Post put it: “angry, betrayed, grieving all he’d lost while trying to do everything right.”

In one of his videos, he called the American Dream an “illusion of something better that is never going to come.”

He woke up to 25,000 comments. Nearly 3 million people have now watched. And then something happened. Strangers started telling him, and each other, the truth.

“I make more than I ever have and am more broke than I’ve ever been.”

“I make 70k a year before taxes, and I live paycheck to paycheck.”

“My mother can hardly afford food… after working for 36 years.”

One mom wrote that she earns $50,000 a year. She sleeps on the couch, so her seven-year-old daughter can have their only bed.

Read that again. A working mom. Fifty thousand dollars. The couch.

A school bus driver interviewed for the story makes $22 an hour and still needs a second job to keep up.

Wilton’s comment section became a place where people could finally say it out loud: it’s not just me.

It’s not. Here in California, the fourth-largest economy in the world, 6.7 million people lived below the poverty line in 2024. Without safety-net programs, many of which Washington is threatening right now, another 2.5 million would join them.

The Baseline is Too Low

When we sat down with low-income women across California, one woman in East Los Angeles told us almost exactly what Wilton’s commenters said. “The salary goes up, but everything else also goes up. And you’re left in the same place.”

None of these people failed. They’re working. Serving. Raising kids. Doing everything they were told would be enough. It isn’t enough, because the baseline is too low.

A job alone isn’t enough. A mom earning $50,000 shouldn’t have to sleep on the couch. Work has to pay wages that cover real costs, include tax credits like CalEITC, and provide support when life goes sideways.

A lifetime of work should mean security. No one who has worked for 36 years should wonder whether she can afford groceries.

We’ve already seen what raising the baseline does. When pandemic-era support expanded, poverty fell. When it ended, poverty returned. That was a choice, and we can choose differently.

Here’s the part of Wilton’s story that stays with us. Even now, he’s still dreaming. He talks about buying land someday and building a horse-therapy ranch for veterans.
That’s the American Dream. It isn’t dead. It’s just out of reach for too many people who are doing everything right.

Let’s raise the baseline so they can reach it.

Photos by Kathleen Flynn for the Washington Post