I would define the poors as your average minimum wage earner with low skills, likely collecting some form of welfare, and without much drive or capability to move upward in society. For the most part, being a CPC puts you squarely in the middle to upper middle class, or whatever is left of it anyway, depending on location and how many dependents you have. And as far as your point about making a living wage with no education while your wife stayed home? You're preaching to the choir. My grandpa supported a wife who stayed home and 5 kids in a middle class lifestyle with a high school education. My dad dropped out of hs, got a GED, and was able to work as a mechanic for the city government which allowed my mom to stay home and raise my brother and I until we were old enough to go school so she could get a job that was a little better than minimum wage. I'm a millenial and we grew up very middle class. Now I'm also wondering how I'm going to be able to afford a house one day and know that if I have a wife and kids one day, she'll likely have to work to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. Does that suck? Absolutely, but I'm a realist and I recognize the problem.
What has changed during the last 50+ years? Have corporations really just slowly gotten more greedy as the years have gone by? I don't think so. The real culprit as I've been preaching forever is the growing size and scope of government and the lack of sound money. Central bankers rule the world. Decades of bad policy means means America has gone from the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor. We don't make anything here. We print money and use it to buy cheap Chinese shit. 70% of our "robust" economy is services. Yes, I hate the billionaires and the Blackstones of the world but you have to look at why they are able to do the things they do. It's because the Fed has kept interest rates artificially low for so long that the entire market and economy is distorted. Savers can't get safe returns anywhere so they have to go further and further out on the risk curve, loading up stonks and crypto and other risky assets. Zombie companies that don't make any money are enabled to thrive and suck up capital that would be allocated elsewhere but for the fact that money and debt is so artificially cheap that they don't need to make a profit. Stock speculators have are leveraged to the tits buying any random ticker because valuations don't matter, only liquidity does. So yes, evil enterprises like blackstone are going to borrow money from the fed a 0.25% and buy up all the real estate they can and rent it out to you because there's no risk in doing so. They can borrow limitless amounts and basically can't lose. It's not their fault for taking advantage of the rules of the game. It's that the rules were so poorly designed in the first place!
And once again to the point of bezos and Musk being so rich, it's all a function of funny money and stonk valuations. It could all go poof if they tried to cash out. You saw elon sold like $20 billion in stonk a few months back and tesla crashed like 35%? Lost probably about $400B in market cap so he could cash out $20B worth. Same with bezos, if he sold all his stonk this year, Amazon would probably crash 75%.
And you guys want to talk about these big businesses thriving and making record profits but like to ignore all these dumb covid restrictions that put the final nail in the coffin of the struggling small businesses who were trying to compete. Like let's close small businesses down, make all restaurants take out only for a long time, pay all the workers more to stay home than they made at their monotonous, unstimulating job, and then wonder why small businesses are going under left and right. Only "essential" retailers like Walmart and Amazon and big box grocers allowed to stay open. If the politicians goal was to decimate the country, increase the wealth gap, impoverish as many people as possible and bankrupt as many business owners as possible, they followed the perfect game plan to do so.
The lifespan on this party is almost over though. We don't have any more road left to kick the can. Even the phony government inflation number is running hot at over 7% and the fed has to pretend they can raise rates and withdraw liquidity without causing a depression. But it's not possible. Either they pop they biggest bubble in history and we see the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, or they take the cowards way out and reverse course and keep printing until the dollar loses all of it's purchasing power and we see the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. Either way, shit is gonna hit the fan soon and there's nothing we can do about it, not even tax every billionaire and all their unrealized gains at 100%. I just hope we can learn something and the people who deserve the blame get it, but since most are too dumb to see the forest for the trees, I'll see you soon in USSA comrade.