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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

You should be asking if the ruling class wants the middle class to exist. What is in it for them?

If you're in the ruling class and even remotely intelligent, you'd realize a decently sized middle class is absolutely essential to their own prosperity. Throughout history, when too many people get pushed lower in the social/economic strata is a great way to ignite a rebellion. The masses have nothing left to lose at that point.

More to the point, you need folks to be able to buy your products.

The middle class was a historic accident brought about by the lessons learned from ww2 and the fear of socialism by the ruling class. They want another gilded age..

You need people literally going hungry and starving to death for something like that to happen, which is pretty unlikely.

It really isn't.

In the US we have almost no social safety net. We're cutting back on food assistance budgets, cutting back homeless aid, cutting back medical aid. If you become homeless, suddenly you have next to no chance of finding a job again, and no help from the government.

Cost of living is spiraling out of control while wages stagnate. People ate already having trouble affording the basic necessities.

We are precariously close to having a starving peasant class.

>wages stagnate

Median real wages in the United States have gone up over the last year. Same thing over the last five years and the last ten years.

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Has it gone up 50% over 3 years?

100% - Without mobility.... desperate choices become the only choices.

It's not a conspiracy of the ruling class that housing has gotten more expensive. It's due to regulatory restrictions on housing and new homeowners being able to afford high prices through locked in low interest mortgages. The regulations are there because NIMBYs are against building, and homeowners want their property value to rise over the course of their lifetimes to fund their retirement.

Regulatory restrictions - who controls those? The ruling class.

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