Nice to see the article. I take exception to one point, though I think these observations ultimately serve the author’s ends and understanding. Young (or old) people who cannot find steady work, who cannot afford residences or needed medical care are not middle class. They may have been raised middle class.
This is an important detail. “Middle class” continues to mean people who are at least moderately enfranchised, who have been given tangible motivation to continue within a given system, even when it is applied to people who have not.
The young people that Ms Penny describes here have not. This is poverty, though it is not starvation and may not be a lifelong condition and in a few cases may even be partially voluntary. It is not being middle class, however an individual may self-identify or however an individual may have been raised.
It is worth pausing a moment to consider the gravity of this. Poverty may change how or whether people can love and marry, whether they can be present to raise the children that they have. I have linked to this here many times, but it’s educational. This is Richard Wilkinson discussing economic inequality and the epidemiology of relative poverty for 17 minutes at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en
In brief, if you have enough in an absolute sense but are poorer than your neighbors and acquaintances, in such a way as to be disenfranchised and otherwise treated without respect, it will tend to kill you years early and hamper you with friends and lovers and children. I don’t have any copyright on the term middle-class, but I suspect that this is not the way most of us understand it.
Nope. Young people are generally poor. It’s good to know, so you know that when Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Il Donaldo talk about helping the middle class, they do not mean you. (They don’t mean me, either, for whatever that is worth). They mean people who will pay off student loans in ten years, have a 30-year mortgage somewhere in that time, buy lots of pointless consumer goods, and be overmedicated and shuffled off into hospice care ASAP when they quit work.