Alissa Quart Quotes

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, 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.

There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don't starve. Those are values, too.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

One thing we're going to focus on is the middle class and the crushing prices and stagnant wages they're facing. What motivates me is looking at my 3-year-old son and thinking about what we're passing on to him and his future wife and their future kids.

The men have long been unpaid and need relief.

The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.

Raising a family is difficult enough. But it's even more difficult for single parents struggling to make ends meet. They don't need more obstacles. They need more opportunities.

Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.

The average standard of living of the average American is going to go down. That is the only way we can cope with our debt and trade deficit problems.

There was this conflict within me because so many people would come up to me to ask for prayers for all sorts of things, and 50% would be about money like, 'How can I pay for the tuition fee of my kids?' And I could only pray for them. I had no advice to give them because I didn't know anything about money.

Growing up low income and poor, I didn't have the best relationship with money.

Nonstop taxes killed the middle class.

I never had the help of money in the background - it could be the cherry on the top a little bit - whereas some others had that to offer.

I'm not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there, if we need to repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who are struggling, and I'll continue to take that message across the country.

It's important to save your money. We need it for the long haul but too many Americans don't save and don't invest. It used to be that people would be proud of the fact that they were middle class. You'd have your church and buy a house and you had a car and everything else. Now, it's really, really tough. Everybody has financial issues except for the one percent.

As a mother, I - like everyone else - have to fill my gas tank in my car. I have to feed my family. I have to be able to make sure that I can keep a roof over their heads and, with things escalating the way they are, it's very difficult. People are losing their homes.

I think there are many people in the working class who say, you know what? Yes, maybe we are better off than we were eight years ago, but I am still working two or three jobs, my kid can't afford to go to college, I can't afford child care, my real wages have been going down for 40 years. The middle class is shrinking. Who's standing up for me?

In my twenties, my dad was paying half my rent and my ex boyfriend was paying the other half. I wasn't in a good place!

We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work

The only really effective means of enabling States to deal with the grave problem of poverty is to provide them with the necessary resources through foreign financial aid - public and private - granted under reasonable conditions, within the framework of international commercial relations regulated with fairness.

Middle income families with children are Australia’s new poor

Mark Kirk: Lied about going to war. Opposed middle class tax cuts. And said unemployment's not that big an issue.

Poverty has strange bedfellows.