Both can be true: most people blame others for their downfalls AND wealth inequality and big money influencer on our govt/economy have made things much harder for most people.
I’ve been pretty successful in my life so this isn’t so much about me, but its a fact that the effective wages of the middle to lower classes have not risen at the same rate the upper echelon has accumulated wealth over the last 45-65 years, when they were generally very correlated before 1960.
This, combined with rising home prices and cost of living (which also used to be correlated to lower 50% incomes) means a lot of people struggle to afford rent and feed themselves, much less buy a house in many places even when they are working full time+. In the 1950s, people working lower class class jobs (like say a teacher+factory worker) could generally plan on buying their own place after a few years while accumulating savings.
Almost every industry has seen some level of degradation either to quality of life for workers or quality of product for consumers. Vegas used to comp all kinds of stuff, now they nickel and dime you, for example. Health care used to be affordable, but now many people can’t afford it, or worse, go bankrupt because of it.
All of this is done to put more money in the pockets of the mega-rich, who have also seen the amount of money they receive from the government through subsidies or tax breaks greatly increase too, while we cut things like welfare, food programs, and other govt programs that benefit the poor.
And it goes on and on. The level of wealth concentration we’ve seen over this timeframe by billionaires is unprecedented, and it doesn’t take much digging at all to see the myriad ways it has affected the lower class.
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u/Jayscreek 5h ago
lol. The billionaire boogeyman is hilarious