RT: Long gone are the days of Cinderella stories in America. Rags-to-riches tales may have at one point been part of the American Dream for those aspiring for success in the states.

New statistics show that moving up the social ladder is no longer a dream as obtainable as before.
According to recent studies, the New York Times reveals this week that economic mobility in America is nowhere near as easy to accomplish as in decades past. Instead, immigrants searching for a new chance at prosperity are better off pursuing options in locales as close away as Canada.

“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the US does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” Isabel V. Sawhill of the Brookings Institution tells the Times. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”

Data from the 2010 Census has previously led analysts to uncover that the inequality gap in America is at its greatest in decades. The middle class has been shrinking in recent years, with more and more Americans finding themselves impoverished or in what the government considers simply “low-income” or poor. Roughly one-in-two Americans fall into those categories, while the richest of the rich in the country see sky-rocketing salaries and bank account receipts.

According to recent data from the Congressional Budget Office, the richest one percent of Americans saw their income, adjusted for inflation, balloon up by 275 percent between in 1979 and 2007. Meanwhile, however, the bottom 20 percent of the United States saw their income increase by only a staggering 18 percent.
“The bottom fifth in the US looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries,” researcher Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution adds to the National Review. “Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor.”

More: