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Provide 12 weeks of paid benefits to employees who need time off work to care for a new child, a sick family member, or their own illness. The self-financing trust is funded by premiums paid equally by employers and employees.

Give states additional Child Care and Development Block Grant funding to double the number of children served by child care assistance, make the federal Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit refundable, and expand Head Start and Early Head Start.

Sustaining a strong middle class – and a strong and competitive American economy – over the long term requires a foundation of robust public investment.

The manufacturing sector once offered a large supply of stable, middle-class jobs to American workers. Yet middle-income manufacturing jobs have been disappearing from the United States for the past 30 years. While technological innovation has played a much-recognized role in the erosion of the

Investing in a skilled workforce is vital to America’s long-term economic growth and global competitiveness. Even as the Zero-16 Contract for Education proposed earlier would enable young people graduating from high school to pursue college or career training, the Career Opportunity Plan would

Unions were instrumental in creating the American middle class, and today they continue to empower millions of Americans to bargain for wages and benefits that are capable of sustaining a middle-class standard of living.

Support for Growth, Job Creation, and Career Development

Home ownership is commonly understood as the quintessential marker of having arrived in the middle class: a family’s home is often the single largest asset that they own and has traditionally served as an important vehicle for wealth accumulation and economic security. 

Household debt is burdening millions of families and stifling economic growth in the nation as a whole. In the first half of 2011, 11 million American households – more than one in five homeowners – owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth.1 Millions of families have already lost

Widely shared middle-class prosperity has made the United States the most hopeful and dynamic country on earth.