And I'd like to add that all this talk of "middle class," economics, and especially wealth are overtly subjective topics. Even the word freedom used by many here seems to jump around all over the place--losing its essential meaning. I don't want to get philosophical here, but "eating bitterness" has been going on for thousands of years for "regular" people, so that's nothing new. Even people in the upper echelon always complain about their "bitter" situations. And economic prosperity that is talked of here and elsewhere in the media seems to gauge against the decadent culture that American has created in abusing the same word, freedom, by making it a license to [fill in the blank]. I think Plato's warning on democracy is more relevant to the U.S. than Aristotle's praise of it. Truly, we sound like a fat pig squealing to the rest of the world when we talk of democratic freedom, when we have effectively lost the understanding of the words like great, legacy, or even the very word, democracy, because we are implicitly speaking of the Great American Legacy of Democracy even though we ourselves have lost our own [C. S. Lewis'] proverbial chest.