What does it mean to be middle class? Economic experts talk about levels of income: between two and four times the poverty level, for example, or the middle three quintiles of the income distribution.

When you ask Americans, though, you get a very different answer. First, most Americans believe they are middle class; only a small share say they are poor or rich. Second, what defines the middle class for them – according to decades of polling, focus groups and public discourse – is much broader than income: a job with reasonable pay and benefits; the ability to raise a family without undue hardship; basic economic security grounded in the ownership of homes and other assets; and the opportunity to rise up the economic ladder through education and hard work.

All these core aspects of the middle class are under siege in the US and, increasingly, the UK as well. The most unmistakable sign of trouble, as Larry Mishel and Heidi Shierholz show in Chapter 1.1 of this volume, is the stagnation of median wages that has occurred over the last generation as income gains have accrued overwhelmingly to the richest.

But the income squeeze associated with rising inequality is only the most visible tip of a much larger iceberg of middle-class strain. As wages have stagnated, families have gained economic ground mostly by relying on both parents working more – which has created a ‘care squeeze’ as they juggle paid work and caring for young children or ageing parents. As job-based benefits like health insurance and traditional definedbenefit pensions have eroded or disappeared, middle-class families have borne greater economic risk despite little in the way of greater economic rewards. And the private safety net of savings and wealth on which these families depend has become much more threadbare, especially after the market crisis of 2007.

In short, the ideal and reality of the middle class are increasingly distant. Yet political leaders have been slow to respond to this growing gap and, in crucial areas, have actually made it worse. In this chapter, I examine why, focusing on the US and its lessons for the UK.