We were quite a middle class family, but we had access to all the good things in life, be it books or access to a club. I was outgoing and did a lot of elocution, singing and theatre.
In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.
I’m getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
It’s more than a little ironic that the mantra that swept Bill Clinton into office is exactly what prevented Hillary from winning it. Somehow, the Manhattan billionaire became the voice of the disaffected blue-collar middle class in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Increasingly, staying in the middle class – let alone aspiring to become middle class – is becoming a game of chance.
I want to make sure that ours is a party that is focusing on both middle class issues and not becoming a party of our two coasts.
American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.
Unions go hand-in-hand with a strong middle class.
We’ll rail against the way the government has destroyed our health care market in one breath and resist the support offered to the poor and middle class to navigate this brokenness with the other. This is not conservative; it is incoherence masquerading as ideological purity.
China has a bigger middle class than the entire population of Europe.
You can be poor, middle class, or rich – it doesn’t matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you’ve never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.
From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent. That generated a massive gain in real GDP per person from $16,000 to over $50,000. A huge win for the middle class.
We prefer paychecks to welfare checks for the American people and a robust middle class with rising wages.
I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.
The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.
A middle class is so important to a society that its value cannot be overestimated.
The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people’s perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world – to be accepted.
I grew up middle class – my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.
You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.
As the 2016 presidential race kicks off, candidates on both sides of the aisle are promising to stand up for the middle class. Voters deserve to know that anyone who champions Obamacare cannot honestly say she or he is also a champion of middle-class Americans.
Japan has only 100m people. Asia has 4bn. At least one-third, maybe nearly half, will become middle class, and this is a big opportunity for Japanese businessmen.
To reward work, to grow the middle class and strengthen the economy, to give millions of Americans the respect they deserve… It’s time to raise the minimum wage.
We need a government that does not give in to a globalist agenda, an agenda I am now convinced seeks to bring American as a sovereign nation and the middle class to their knees.
What hinders the middle class the most is taxes, and what hinders business from creating jobs and moving people into the middle class are regulations.
We are the ones looking out for the middle class. Who do think pays for the endless expansion of government? Its middle class taxpayers. Our reforms protect middle class taxpayers.
When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.
The more I support with my economic plans the building of a middle class, the quicker they’re going to turn around and say, ‘Hey, we want a bigger say in things.’ So, I knew what I was getting into right at the beginning. It’s the right thing to do.
The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn’t cost the government a dime.
We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class. It’s called the property tax. Why not a small annual tax on the value of stocks and bonds, the major assets of the wealthy?
If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.
And in terms of their crown jewel legislative achievement: who knew that when asked, ‘will government impose a new federal mandate requiring middle class Americans to buy health insurance whether they can afford it or not?’ The answer would be ‘Yes we can!’
I’m very, very concerned ultimately, as Medicaid costs increase in my state and most states, it’s going to reduce funding for state aid to our public schools, to our higher education institution or higher taxes on the middle class that President Obama said he didn’t want to do. And that’s exactly where he’s headed.
I truly believe that the job creators, those people making $200,000 a year, are the small business men and women that create the jobs and ultimately will help the middle class and the poor.
I lived in a kind of a middle class home, and I didn’t really have a lot of experience with the justice system or prisons or really being aware of that world.
Let’s restore sanity and fairness to the tax cut conversation. We simply cannot afford to hand over the bank vault to our nation’s millionaires and billionaires while the middle class picks up spare change.
This ought to be a season for cooperation in terms of pushing our economy forward, job creation, steadying the middle class, and laying the groundwork for a better future. And that’s what we want to work on with Republicans and Democrats.
They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn’t inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams.
I had quite a turbulent upbringing. It was middle class, and everything was quite comfortable, but everyone was mental.
My parents taught me practical things, about how important hard work, discipline and the necessity of managing your own money were. Their values were very much the values of the postwar middle class.
Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt.
To me, greatness does not mean mortgaging the future of our middle class by giving tax cuts to our wealthiest citizens.
With Americans worried about losing their jobs, their savings, their homes and their chance at the American Dream, the New Direction Congress will work in a bipartisan way to lift our economy and help America’s middle class.
One of the things I get amused by is when my opponent talks about the middle class.
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats – kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
With golf becoming part of the Olympics now, it is even more imperative that more of the middle class get access to the sport.
This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business.
The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.
MGR’s rule took care of the poor, the downtrodden, and the middle class. I have faith that I, too, can provide that rule. With the help of technology and the support of youngsters, resourceful people, and intellectuals, I, too, can provide that kind of a rule.
We can move America forward with a strong middle class. We can move America forward with a strong Democratic majority in the Senate. And together we can move America forward with Barack Obama in the White House.
‘Middle class’ used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called ‘middle class,’ unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society’s wounded.
