On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class
The hell of it is, he <i>still</i> isn&#x27;t middle class. The US doesn&#x27;t even have a middle class anymore. He is just no longer at the very bottom of the underclass. He is now mid-lower lower class.<p>It is impossibly hard for most people not in the upper class in the US to conceive of just how impossibly far they are from that upper class. $100k&#x2F;yr? Lower class. $200k&#x2F;yr? <i>Still</i> lower class: you still can&#x27;t afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. <i>Yes</i>, that was what middle-class people <i>used to</i> do.<p>What happened to the middle class? It was eliminated, by explicit political policy. The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Those few are either tacking to get to the upper class, probably futilely, or are well on their way out of it, and won&#x27;t be back.<p>The Republican Party discovered that they could get lower-class people to vote against their own interests, and for the interests of the upper class, by convincing them they were not lower class. Now half the country votes mainly to try to keep the desperately poor from taking what <i>they</i> have managed to scrabble together, and in the process ensure the extremely rich get extremely richer and don&#x27;t have to pay for anything, and especially not let any of it go to those same voters.<p>Up until around 1970, Americans&#x27; income was on a relentless rise. That had stopped by 1980, and has been more or less level, since. The income didn&#x27;t go away, at all. The total amount has skyrocketed, since, going up at the same rate as before. Just, rich people get all of the difference, everything from that line down to the flat line describing what they have left for the rest of us. All this is policy, and the program to get there was spelled out in the Powell Memorandum, which you can read online.<p>During COVID lockdown and supply-chain upsets, they got insanely more money, somehow, again at the rest of our expense.