Of course, popular culture isn't the only place where the rags-to-riches myth is pushed onto onto an unsuspecting public. Las Vegas, Indian casinos, Atlantic City—all of them do what they can to make you believe you will become rich. Just give them your money, play a hand of blackjack, sit down and plunk some tokens into a slot machine, play some poker, with skill and a little bit of luck you will walk out with money falling out of your pockets. Many states are in on pushing this myth as well. You are bombarded with chances to win big every time you walk into convenience store and see the state-run lottery displays. You have better odds of being struck by lightning than you do of winning big in the lottery. Many who play the lottery will be the first to complain that taxes are too high. What do they think the lottery is? It is nothing more than a voluntary tax on the people who can least afford it, the poor.

I remember when I first got out of the U.S. Army and my dad had me meet with an insurance salesman about a life insurance policy. The whole sales spiel at the time was that if I paid X amount of dollars each month, I'd be a millionaire by the time I hit 40. The allure of me being a millionaire by the time I was 40 was too much for my dad—he wanted me to put my money in this policy, money I needed for school. I did it for a while, but paying my rent in the present eventually won out over millions when I was 40. Even my dad was drawn in to the allure of millions, the man who did not trust the stock market wanted me to put my money into a something that invested in the stock market.

Even our retirement system is based on the myth of rags to riches. If you save enough, you will retire with millions in your 401(k) plan. But life events like illness, divorce, job loss, or something out of your control like a downturn in the stock market can wipe out your life's savings, leaving you with nothing.

The quest for wealth, the desire to go from rags to riches, has dominated American culture from before our nation was founded. This quest for ever more wealth gave us the robber barons during the Gilded Age. It has given us what we have today, wealth inequity on a scale that we've not seen in the United States since 1929, and we all know what happened then.

As a nation, we need to take the focus off of the rags-to-riches myth. Instead of chasing the dollar, we should focus on making sure that everyone has a place at the table, and everyone gets a share of the pie. There is no reason that a CEO should be making 350 times the average worker. Pay the CEO less, raise the wages of those actually doing the work. We not only need a raise to the minimum wage, we also need a maximum wage. We need to ensure that every American can have a comfortable retirement—at an age when a person can actually enjoy life after a lifetime of work.

The rags-to-riches mythology, this chase for ever-increasing wealth, is not healthy for our nation. It does more harm than good. It prevents out leadership from crafting legislation that helps the poor and middle class. It is why people vote against their best interest and will push for and defend tax cuts for the 1 percent. To paraphrase John Steinbeck, "...the (American) poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."