What you and the Times are calling “upper middle class” I think is more accurately called the “professional” class. You got your doctors, lawyers, university professors, small business owners, architects, accountants, upper management, etc. That’s generally the top 15 percent of income earners.
I don’t doubt that this groups income has chugged right along with GDP over the years. It’s in the interest of the top .0001 percent who are currently hoarding the grotesque majority of this country’s new wealth to keep both the professional class relatively happy and give the lower class, including what we used to know as the middle class, someone else to resent instead of the top .0001 percenters.
Think about it. How much contact does the bottom 90 percent have with the top .0001 percent? None. Never. Zilch.
How much contact does the bottom 90 percent have with the professional class? Quite a bit. And the professional class gets to tell them what to do, (watch your weight fatass, study for this test, get me a TPS report, fetch me some coffee, you fucked up your taxes last year, pay me 5k or your’re going to jail for DWI,) while looking relatively wealthy in comparison while the lower and middle class get poorer and poorer. It breeds understandable resentment that is misdirected as to where it should be going, namely the thieves at the top .0001 percent.
This latest republican tax scame is the perfect example of what is and has been going on for damn near 40 years and is nothing but a money grab by the top .0001 percent at the expense of every fucking other person in the country. It’s obscene and the fact that the republicans support it should doom them to minority status for not just years, but decades.