'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.
Interpretation
The middle class, once viewed as stable and secure, now faces insecurity and change.
Elizabeth Warren's quote reflects the significant transformation in the perception of the middle class from a state of security and predictability to one of uncertainty and vulnerability. It suggests that economic stability that characterized the middle class in the past has eroded, making it harder for individuals to rely on traditional markers of success and security throughout their lives.
In practice
Discussing economic policies during a political debate.
Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.
After spending three or four years interacting with the Bush administration, I realized they were not taking any actions to deal with climate change. So, I decided to give one talk, and then it snowballed into another talk and eventually to even protesting and getting arrested.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.
When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--
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