Tom Junod Quotes

The middle class serves as a bridge between the haves and the have-nots. If it goes, so goes political stability.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

We need the middle class to feel more confident about its prospects and about its future. We need to cut down on this anxiety that sees some people succeeding and the majority struggling - having to make choices between paying for their kids' education or saving for their own retirement.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

We cannot run a democracy without a strong middle class.

If you destroy the middle class for the sake of the economic institutions, you guarantee instability and danger.

The middle class is the group in this country that has been taken for a ride.

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

Every country has rich people. But only a few places have achieved a vibrant and stable middle class. And in the history of the world, none has been more vibrant and more stable than the American middle class.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

The beauty of not growing up middle class is that you don't think like the middle class. You don't have anything to protect, you know what I mean?

Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs - except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them.

Uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle class in many societies.

The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.