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[quote=Anonymous]I think part of this is that what an UMC lifestyle is today is closer to what the middle class experienced 40-50 years. Single family home, good paying professional and stable jobs, nice local public schools, 2-3 kids, good health care plans, fully funded retirement accounts or at least enough to be on track for a reasonable retirement and fund their children's college education. In the DMV, being able to satisfy all of these is now a luxury good. Moreover, many of these items (housing with good local public schools, good health care plans, college) have increased relative to average incomes and are now out of reach for those in the middle class and below.

There was a good piece in The Atlantic a few months ago regarding The Simpsons and how America's most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans.  Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary. This lifestyle was not fantastical in the slightest—nothing, for example, like the ridiculously large Manhattan apartments in Friends. On the contrary, the Simpsons used to be quite ordinary—they were a lot like Michigan working-class families in the 1990s.[/quote]

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