OPINION: What Middle-Class Families Want Politicians to Know

They all want to help “everyday Americans.” But do leaders really understand what it takes?

Being middle class in America used to come with a certain amount of leisure and economic security. Today, it involves an endless series of trade-offs and creative workarounds, career reinventions and an inescapable sense of dread.

We asked readers to tell us what it’s like, and more than 500 people, with widely varied incomes, submitted responses. They described not just their financial worries, but the texture of daily life. Even those with very good incomes expressed fears of instability. They have seen their wages and bargaining power stagnate, and wealth spiral up to the top, while they struggle to acquire the markers of middle-class life — a college education, health care, the deed to a home.

As one reader, Kristin DePue, put it, “There is an extraordinary burden on my generation to fund our own retirement and also afford college costs for our children.” Indeed, “middle-class life is now 30 percent more expensive than it was 20 years ago,” the journalist Alissa Quart writes in “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.” And yet, for all the talk of “everyday Americans” among the presidential candidates, politicians do not seem to understand what it takes to get through the day, or what would really help. — E. Tammy Kim, contributing opinion writer