I was recently in a grocery store in a middle class neighborhood.  I had to go to the customer service desk.  I realized the other people in line were all waiting to buy lottery tickets.  Some of them were buying what seemed like a large number of lottery tickets.  It was far more than one or two.

I’m guessing some of these same people clamor for the government to protect them from terrorists.  Their odds of being struck by a terrorist are about the same as winning the lotto.  It is virtually zero.

For most of these people, this is their only hope for the future.  It is sad to see.  I’m sure most of them work hard for their money and yet they are squandering it on lotto tickets.  They are trying to hit a home run that will never come.  They know they have no hope of becoming wealthy unless they win the lotto.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is actually a sad state of affairs in America right now.  And it is better in America than it is in Europe and parts of Asia.  The American middle class is struggling.  We have these new great technologies with smart phones, tablets, big screen televisions, and so on, yet, at the same time, living standards are declining in many ways.

Life is expensive.  This is the cost of big government in terms of government spending and government regulations.  It is at all levels of government, but particularly bad at the national level.  Health insurance and medical care are ridiculously expensive.  This is the cost of bureaucracy.  In real terms, wages are going down for many people.  And that is for the people who are fortunate enough to have jobs.

It is very difficult to save money these days.  How can you save money when the government is trying to take so much of it?  Americans are struggling to fund any kind of retirement, let alone build up enough of a cushion for an emergency account.  The majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, or something close to it.

There is not a lot of hope and optimism in the air.  Perhaps there may be some young people out there entering adulthood who are looking to take on the world.  While I think it is great to see, I fear that many of these people will have their hopes shattered once they hit the real world.

Aside from technology, living standards may actually be declining for middle class America.  The only way to reverse this trend is to get big government off of our backs.  I hope that most Americans will soon realize that they are far poorer than they need to be.  They are the victims of an establishment that has tricked them into believing that they need big government to survive.  Yet, the opposite is true.