On the recordDecember 7, 2011
I have come to the floor on numerous occasions this year to discuss the distressed state of America's middle class. In fact, in our committee, we have had a series of hearings looking at the state of the middle class and what is happening to the middle class in America. In recent decades, our Nation's once secure middle class has struggled in the face of stagnant wages, declining job security, rising indebtedness, and disappearing pensions, not to mention sharply higher costs for health care, education, food, and energy. It wasn't always this way. In the three decades after World War II, America's middle class grew rapidly. Incomes rose steadily as the middle class secured its fair share of the expanding national wealth. The Federal Government invested generously in infrastructure building, innovation, and education, vastly expanding opportunity for people to move into the middle class. America became a more equal, fair, and just society, built on a solid bedrock of a strong middle class. I am an example of that. My father had an eighth grade education. He was a coal miner. My mother was an immigrant with very little formal education. Yet their three children were able to go to good schools, get good jobs, and get an education. All three of their children graduated from Iowa State University, a great land grant college, because it didn't cost very much and we could afford to go there and we were able to enter the middle class from those humble beginnings.…
