In Florida, almost anyone can have access to the beach. Up until the past few years, a middle-class family could live within a bicycle ride to the beach.

A family relying on a teacher's salary or a city employee's salary is solidly middle class as long as that money's coming in. When it's cut off, they're committed to financial obligations that will quickly turn them upside down.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class family. Street life is foreign to me. I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive.

would lead to a 40 percent cut in current benefits for middle-class beneficiaries, add five trillion dollars to our national debt and make the system weaker in the future.

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.

This is a full-scale assault on middle-class homeowners, and we need even at this early moment to indicate to the president that we'll bear any burden to defend against it. We ought to take a look at the lavish [tax] giveaways we give to huge corporate interests.