Politics & Power Quote by James Sinegal

It is a CEO’s civics lesson smuggled into a sentence about mortgages and tuition. Sinegal, best known for building Costco into a middle-class temple of bulk and bargains, frames national “strength” not in military terms or abstract GDP, but in the plain mechanics of household solvency: own a home, educate your kids, keep a foothold in the future. The wording is deliberate. “Has always been” casts the middle class as a founding asset, implying that today’s instability isn’t just unfortunate but historically aberrant - a deviation from an American baseline we’re supposed to recognize and miss.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of an economy that has made those two markers - homeownership and schooling - feel like luxury goods. He doesn’t mention wages, health care, interest rates, zoning, or student debt, but the omissions function like negative space in design: you see the shape of the problem by what’s left unsaid. By anchoring the idea of a “strong middle class” to affordability, he’s asserting that the test of an economy is not whether wealth exists, but whether ordinary people can buy stability.

Coming from a businessman, the line also reads as self-interested in a way that isn’t cynical - it’s structural. Retail empires depend on consumers with predictable budgets. A squeezed middle class doesn’t just weaken “the nation”; it weakens the whole ecosystem that makes mass-market prosperity possible. In that sense, Sinegal’s nostalgia is also a warning: if the middle class can’t finance the basics, America’s economic story stops being scalable.