I'm just a public-schoolboy. I've got a degree. I'm from a middle-class family in Devon. I've got no story.

You have no idea how humiliating it was as a boy to suddenly have all your clothes your toys snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed I felt dirty.

I think and I mean this sincerely I was raised humbly. We were a lower middle income family and a household that was scrimping by at times. We were watching the dollar stretching the dollar and coupons. It was all those things.

I'm from a nice suburban middle-class family but my tattoos remind me where I've been.

Like a lot of you I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

In the family sandwich the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are for a time the meat.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage as I like to put it and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

I'm from a lower middle class background all my family were immigrants.

In the richest country in the history of the world this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4 0 but health insurance premiums are higher food prices are higher utility bills are higher and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week the minimum wage family leave health insurance Social Security Medicare retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.