“Tactile lobbying…” that one’s almost as good as “kinetic sanctions”.

Entirely backwards- asexual people don’t need to make excuses for it. But someone who’s forever alone with an attitude like the character in the meme is likely to pretend they’re asexual. Simpler that way. No one will challenge it because asexuality is something they don’t understand enough to argue about, beyond a vague notion it would come off as insensitive if they tried.

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“Financialization” is the key.

The upper class is the investor class. They live off of passive income generated by their owned capital- interest, dividends, rents. Their wealth grows faster than they can spend it.

The lower class is the working class is the debtor class. They live paycheck to paycheck, exchanging 80 hours of labor for another two weeks of housing and food. Any big thing they ‘own’ is bought with debt, and interest on those debts eats up most of what they would otherwise be saving.

So obviously it’s a fuzzy continuum but the middle of the middle class is someone who has both investments and debts and is making nearly the same amount in passive income as they are for paid labor. They are living better than most anyone without investments, but still can’t stop working tomorrow. They hope to be able to stop working someday.

Those people are motivated to defend the system as it is because the same financialized economy that keeps the rich getting richer is- or was- also their only ladder out of a lifetime of wage slavery. They may even know that a radical socialist restructuring of society would be better for them, but have no faith in the moderate liberal political parties to pull it off, and aware of how precarious their position is.

The ultra wealthy could lose half their wealth and half their income, and barely even notice. The almost-wealthy would fall off those ladders and never get back up. But when it finally comes time to eat the rich, they’ll be the closest thing to an actual rich person the hungry masses have ever even seen.

Is the answer assholes? I bet it’s assholes.

The wheels have fallen off some time ago but the bottom has not yet worn through from dragging it up to the curb each week.

Let’s be real though; that savings you were able to wipe out by overspending when the cost of living went up wasn’t nearly enough to matter anyway. The amount of savings that matters is in the low 7 figures. If you are very careful and disciplined and organized, and sacrifice most opportunities to live well on your time off, and lucky enough to avoid major catastrophe- you can* achieve that after an entire lifetime of selling your soul to the capitalist machine in 40-hour increments. So that for your final 10-to-20 years before dying of old age, you get to maintain a humble working-class standard of living without having to work, and that is a successful life. The American Dream.

*Or at least you could acheive it, under more favorable economic conditions than what we have now or can expect to ever see again in the future.

If you have a 401(k), is it really your retirement savings or is it just your surviving a layoff and not becoming homeless for however many months it takes to find another job savings? That depends entirely on how big it is right now. And if you have to use it for the latter while it’s still at its current size, the chance of being able to use for the former goes down significantly.

Also, if you paid off all your debts would you still have savings left over? If not, then you don’t actually have any savings.

Maybe young people are choosing sports betting over investing in stocks and bonds these days not because they don’t understand economics and finance, but because they do. A small, very high-risk chance of making enough money vs. a low-risk chance making definitely not enough money- that could be entirely rational.

Because if you’ve only saved almost enough to retire, you still have to work until you die to make up the difference; just at a low-paying part-time job. You know, the hardest, worst jobs involving the most actual work.

Ok that was a heavier rant than I originally meant to write in response to a lolcat shitpost on 196. Maybe more directed at the dozen or so boomer-coded, survivorship-biased, victim-blaming Marketwatch op-ed articles I’ve hate-read for whatever reason.