Steve Forbes: A Message to Anyone Feeling the American Dream Is Lost

Steve Forbes: A Message to Anyone Feeling the American Dream Is Lost

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Jul 17, 2026

It is becoming increasingly common to hear the American Dream is dead, with young people today often citing housing prices, the difficulty of finding jobs, and tax burdens.
Forbes Media chairman Steve Forbes has a very different take.
“A free people always finds ways to move ahead, even though times and circumstances change. The problems we face today are not anything inherent in America, but in mistakes made by government. And the nice thing about that is mistakes can be undone,” Forbes said.
He’s the editor-in-chief of Forbes Media and the co-author of “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It.”
In this wide-ranging episode, filmed at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, we dove into the rise of democratic socialist candidates, DEI hiring, inflation, how the United States should approach Taiwan and Iran, and the basic truth about prosperity that no one is teaching today.
At the heart of this conversation is an extremely hopeful message: “Human ingenuity is unlimited. Have faith in the future.”