That’s a fair point, but we don’t see relatively affluent people being blamed for driving up the stock market.
And … yet … as I mentioned earlier in this thread … those investment dollars aren’t in mason jars in the yard, in mattresses, or in piggy banks. They’re in the pipeline and are somewhat traceable.
As is money put in banks and other savings vehicles.
Meaning … that money is being spent. In the process, it creates upward pricing pressure.
But we aren’t blaming the wealthy for their tendency to create inflation – inflation that can starve the least well-heeled among us or render them homeless as already unaffordable housing grows ever more out of their reach.
We blame the lowest rung for trying not to fall even farther behind on the very basics. We also wonder why they tend to stay on the lowest rung, generation after generation.
Food, clothing, shelter, health care, education.
Automation and outsourcing put a serious hurt on what used to be the jobs you could reliably get if you weren’t college-bound. It left a feeding frenzy for entry-level jobs with undocumented immigrants added to the pool of seekers.
We took away well-paying jobs – jobs that could put you in a modest house, feed your family, send your kids to college, and provide a reasonable retirement (either because of, or in spite of, strong labor unions).
In exchange, we gave the people who used to do those jobs WalMart, Dollar General, and no end of government assistance (we’ve privatized profit and socialized loss) and convinced them to be pleased as punch with the trade-off.
Those at the bottom are daily affected, in profound ways, by the activities of those at the top. But a) the impacts of those at the top on those at the bottom are rarely discussed … particularly in stark or pejorative terms, and b) those at the bottom don’t get to vote on the incomes of those at the top.