A Quote by Stephanie Coontz

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.
When I was just 13, we went from being middle class to lower middle class and finally lower class, as someone close to my father took away everything he had, including his property. All of a sudden, I started working at the age of 13.
Most middle-class Americans, even working-class Americans, encounter each other across racial lines all the time, but it gets really hard-core when you get into that witches' brew that is the combination of race and poverty.
My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.
Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.
The Democrat Party is threatened by people whose economic circumstances improve to the point that they do not need government first and foremost. That's a threat. But this happens when the U.S. economy is humming. There is a lot of upward mobility, and people leave the lower depths of poverty and start traversing a pathway through the middle class to the upper middle class, and as they leave, the Democrats have to replace them. That is what illegal immigration has been since 1965 when Ted Kennedy reintroduced the whole concept after 40 years of no immigration from 1921 to 1965.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
It`s not just Republicans. It`s Republicans and Democrats. It`s middle class, lower middle class, working class Americans who have felt the angst, who are frustrated, who are angry as a result of 1% growth which, in my view, has been really the issue that has propelled Donald Trump from day one.
For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America
The Mexican people are increasingly middle class, and Mexico has substantially become a middle-class society. This is true despite the significant poverty, and the class and geographic inequality that have deep historical roots.
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.
I have made films on humor of poverty because I have lived in a lower middle class family.
If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots, and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.
I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.
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