The rise of China, India, Brazil and other countries have cut the wages in America and put our workers out of jobs. Manufacturing now accounts for only 12 percent of U.S. jobs. We are losing an economic battle, a battle that the majority of America thinks was mismanaged for years. Since 1975 the United States has traded at a deficit, importing far more goods than we export. Our levels of production have dropped, to the detriment of our ability to innovate and train workers. America’s economic system is in shatters and we are going to continue to face repercussions if something drastic is not done to put the control of our future back in our own hands.

Middle class American families have been feeling the pain of a poor economic structure for years. Termed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the distribution of income has favored the wealthiest Americans but hurt the middle class. The inflation-adjusted wages of those in the middle class have stagnated or in some levels dropped over the past 37 years. Over the same period, the incomes of the top 1 percent have tripled, according to a Financial Times report by Edward Luce.

More and more Americans are being forced to live paycheck to paycheck with no ability to save. Without the ability to save, and the fact that most people are now losing income when they change jobs, a lot of Middle America lacks the ability to live the American Dream. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the American Dream has died.

“Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: ‘America is the best country in the world to be poor.’ That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe,” Luce writes.

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