What did "middle class" mean to you when you were 20-30 something?

[abelenkpe]

28. My parents grew up in a time when one could

Graduate from high school, get a steady job, get married, buy a home, raise a family, and retire in comfort with a pension on one salary. They were solidly middle class.

All of the kids in my family have excelled in school, gone to college, been saddled with years of student loan debt (because even when one receives scholarships it doesn't pay your entire way), need two working parents in order to get by and none have come close to living at the same level as our parents generation. Elisabeth Warren had a great lecture online outlining the information in her book the two income trap that shows how families today pay far more for the basics than our parents did. Millenials have it worse. They are lucky to find work (and it certainly isn't secure), and are saddled with more debt.

Nothing either side is proposing will recreate the world our parents grew up in. True economic recovery has to grow from the bottom up with workers in steady secure well paying jobs with the promise of retirement after a life of work. Secure in the knowledge that one illness won't wipe them out and leave their family in debt for medical care. That they can send their kids to college so they too can succeed. We need a new new deal and discussions centering around how little or how much we will cut are a sad surrender to the wishes of banks and wall street at the expense of everyone else.