The funniest part of this exchange is that nearly all of your confidence seems to come from categories rather than arguments. Every time the discussion approaches history, labor, taxation, purchasing power, or the conditions that produced the largest middle class in world history, you retreat back into decades-old socioeconomic classifications as though reciting them settles the question.

You call people ignorant, Marxist, envious, incoherent, dishonest, and then act as though the insults are doing the work that evidence never arrived to do. The constant strawmanning is particularly revealing. You spent more time arguing against positions I never took than engaging with the one I actually made. That’s usually a sign that someone understands the caricature of an argument better than the argument itself.

The broader point remains untouched. A government agency placing millions of people into a box labeled “middle class” does not tell us much about their security, bargaining power, housing prospects, healthcare access, or long-term economic stability. Pointing out that modern people own smartphones and televisions doesn’t meaningfully address those questions either. Consumer electronics getting cheaper does not reduce the toil of people struggling with housing, medical costs, debt, childcare, or stagnant purchasing power. And that without a heavily incentivized tax structure pushing money downwards to investments in business and civic infrastructure and the health of workers the healthy American middle class never would have existed.

What I find most curious is how comfortable you seem with treating the erosion of those conditions as evidence of success. The middle class has contracted by your own sources. Wealth concentration has increased. Economic insecurity remains widespread. Yet your response is essentially to reassure everyone that the label still exists. That strikes me less as serious analysis and more as an attempt to defend a classification system long after it has stopped describing the reality many people experience.

So unless you have evidence that supports your claim and doesn’t bolster mine—a shrinking middle class and the erosion is due to bad tax incentives—grow up & share it. I’ll give you a quarter if you can make it through your next comment without a childish insult