Honestly it’s hard for me too. I think I qualify as “upper middle class” (though it feels squarely like middle now) and most people I know are in that strata too. As such it’s hard for me to fathom “my fellow American” as I don’t see it directly. But just knowing that stat gives me serious pause.

And that I think is the biggest barrier for congress critters. They’re so far removed and insulated from it, they just dismiss the facts because “it doesn’t feel right to them”. It’s a level of cognitive dissonance that requires you to willfully put in effort to understand and most just don’t want to.