We had a very upwardly mobile economy, and that peaked around the 1950s when the typical middle-class American family consisted of a father with a job and stay-at-home mom who took care of the kids.

Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.

The middle class today would be poor by the standards of the 1950s. Today, with two people working, they would still live paycheck to paycheck.

Peter Schiff Quotes