You have still missed my point. The American dream was an effective, real thing for a long period of time. Most Americans today are descendants of poor immigrants that worked hard and gave their children a better quality of life. This wasn’t “a lottery” and your characterization of it as such is both historically misinformed and just ideological in nature.

As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.