Nate Cohn

They have Medicare.

They already raised their family.

While on the other hand, now a majority of voters under 45 say that the cost of having a family has gotten so high that it's become unaffordable.

It's a really good question, and it's one people have been debating about for years now.

I think that it's useful to step back and think about what the economic data we're talking about really is and what it says.

The main measure that people are looking at to say that things aren't that bad is real median income.

That's how much money people are making adjust inflation.

And inflation is measured by something called the consumer price index, which is a basket of goods, everything from food to electronics to childcare.

And it looks at how much the average person spends and how much the cost of that average person spending changes over time.

By that measure, people's wages have been keeping up with the growing costs of goods.

So that's where you get the argument that maybe things aren't actually that bad.

Maybe we're actually better off than ever before, even if it doesn't feel like it.

I think the catch, though, is that that story doesn't necessarily hold up for the goods that we've been talking about.

The price of housing, health care, education, those middle-class necessities, the prices of those goods has increased more than wages in recent decades.

So if you're the kind of person who is trying to buy those goods today,

you really are finding it harder to buy those things than you would have 40 or 50 years ago.

For the people that we're talking about

who are trying to get that middle class life, who haven't bought it yet, people in their late 20s, 30s, who are now staring at having to buy those things, they are going to try and tackle those big and growing costs head on.

And for that person, I think that there's a really good argument that their incomes haven't necessarily kept up with the ability to buy into this middle class life.

Yeah, there are a lot of different layers here because these things are so expensive and because they are so essential, they are very difficult to compromise on.