Perhaps our current financial situation influences our decision. Middle class income people don't need the money perhaps.
I think you may be on to something there. That isn't to say that rich and middle class people don't have their own financial stress, but I think its of a different nature.
For example, I knew an upperclass person who would complain of financial difficulties- involving the value of his very large home, his vacation home, his timeshare, and his $10 million or so worth of real estate investments. Granted, he actually did wind up overextended because of various factors and went through a bakruptcy- out of which he just has a real nice house worth more than my projected lifetime earnings, a couple small investment type properties, and a few cars. He had health trouble and became unable to work a normal non-investing job, but unlike working class folks, he had a substantial insurance policy that pays out a disabiliy payment he can add to his government payment (The insurance policy being by far the larger of the two)- combining with other things to give him what might be at least a lower middle class income, with no rent or mortgage payments to make.
Now, things went really bad for him and it is a sad story, *but* his version of everything that could possibly go wrong going wrong results in an income higher than I have a nice house and other things I could never hope to achieve. So, it is different. Because there is still some security there for people like that if the bottom falls out, not that it makes it feel less awful, I'm sure.
Similarly, a middle class family going well may have a nice multi-floor house with a two car garage, a couple cars, a nice vacation each year, etc.. One thing I think the Great Recession and growing income disparity have shown is that they really can go from that to abject poverty, *but* they still probably are more secure than the poor, relatively speaking.
When you're even in the upper reaches of poverty, you are never really too far from staying in a ghetto with 5 roommates in a very questionanle slummy apartment and not having access to a car and stuff. You barely bob above that sometimes, and maybe you have your own apartment (but one that involves a lot of conpromises in terms of location, ammentites, what you'll put up with from a landlord, etc.) and access to a car and the occasional phone or other nice device, but that's some people's upper limit and they have to fight to *keep* that lest they fall downward.
You know what I'd love to have someday? A house. I sit around dreaming of my unreachable goal of having a cape code or a split foyer (Lower end housing, but much nicer than any apartment I've lived in), on an acre or two of land with no one living within 10 feet to either side, and me owning everything below and above me- in an area I choose, with the freedom to sell at whim and look elsewhere if things go bad.
I can't tell you how many major problems in my life have been driven by the fact that I live in an apartment over the years and things can escalate fast if you get two people who are a little territorial who's stuff kind of overlaps and who really can't get away from the problems they create for one another. Sometimes, the problem is even the rich guy who owns part of a building as an investment property and doesn't even live there, but goes and threatens and messes with your life because he thinks you're nothing because you're poor and just walks all over you and goes home at the end of the day and laughs about it. You can hit back, and I certainly do (Within legal limits, of course), but police tend to take the side of the landed gentry over the peasants, and it is the gentry and not the peasants who can afford lawyers over those types of disruptes. I have to be exceptionally clever to make any negative impact at all on people who try to bully me that way, given the power disparity, but, fortunately, I am kind of clever, and sometimes I can make them a fraction as miserable as they make me.
But the whole thing is stupid. Who wants a lifetime of that? I'll take your few million and buy a house and such.
In situations like that, people often have the only apartment they can find that they afford, maybe through knowing the owner or some other arrangement, and so can often be essentially stuck there even if they'd be willing to move and leave the people who are creating problems behind them.
Actually, if you've ever studied psychology, you may have heard of Maslov's hiearchy of needs. What this fellow Maslov theorized was that you could only meet higher needs or desires when the lower ones were meant. So, if you were starving, you would have trouble focusing on things that didn't need to filling your stomach. Other basic goals were like having shelter. And you'd sort of build this pyramid, and if you had base things taken care of, you'd build up to like working on finding love or achieving a career goal not directly related to being able to afford your basic needs, and so on and so forth. The highest thing at the tip of the pyramid was self-actualization.
In a way, heaven is self-actualization, conceptually speaking. If you don't have the lower needs or desires met, you'll generally consider it more inportant to meet them.
Now, there are obvious exceptions to that, and one reason Christianity could be so popular during with lower classes in tough times and places like the European middle ages, is that Christianity extended people who had no hope in this life of meeting their needs in the next. Phrases like the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and store your treasure in heaven had special meaning for the poor in some eras because there was no hope for them on earth.
The problem that sometimes comes in there, though, is that saying it'll all work out in heaven is a convienent excuse for not pursuing governmental and social policies to allieviate poverty. Thats one reason the ultrawealthy and the religious right have gotten so cozy in some places politically. You have some poor church goers sending their only dollars off to people to go get into office and hurt their own social and economic interests because they are thinking of God and the next life, and you have the wealthy corporate class and their politicians very ready to take advantage of that by pretending to adopt and maybe even genuinely adopting, a few token "Christian values" that won't hurt their pocketbooks to gain votes from the poor who will grow poorer.
Further, we can also see poor being preyed upon by rich folks who scapegoat, sometimes with thin religious excuses, and sometimes not. They tell the poor that they are poor because the Mexicans are taking their jobs or whatever, and ask to be elected to stop that, when the real problem is wealth distribution and a lack of a strong social safety net. They also tend to focus on issues like terrorism, which are important, but kill far fewer people than economic policies that aren't fair, or a lack of access to the best health care, or whatever. One of the most successful hookwinkings of the American lower and middle class was when people without healthcare who were suffering and dying because of their lack of access, that they should oppose efforts to expand healthcare and save the lives of people like them, because it might lead to or be "socialism", and because some rich guy with a chain of huge stores might have to provide health plans to their employees that could be used as the mir employees saw fit and not as their employer saw fit. It isn't immoral for an employer to pay people cash, even though the people may use it to buy things that the employer might not approve of (alcohol, pornography, whatever), so why would it be immoral for an employer to have to pay some of their employees partly in the form of health care plans that a few might choose to "spend" on birth control? It isn't. But monied interests control many of the churches and groups within the churches, or propogandize and wield a large amount of influencr, becaude money can buy a lot of propoganda, and thus...
You know, right now, there is something called an Epipen. My understanding is that people with severe allergies that could kill them on the spot if are exposed to the wrong thing, have to carry these things aroubd, so they can jam something like a needle in their thigh and save their own lives because the medicine within acts very quickly to keep their throats and nasal passages open so they can breath and/or whatever else.
Recently its come to light that a package of two of these dispensers with medicine cost $600 each. That's two doses. And the medicine expires every year or so, so people have to replace them whether they use them or not, and they may need more than two (Like one for the car, one for home, one for work, one to keep at a friend's house, etc.).
The medicine inside these plus the injectors thenselves total cost about $5-$6 to make. So, this $600 pack at cost would be $10-$12. They could add in a profit margin of more than double their costs, and it'd be $25. Something is very wrong with this system.
Hillary Clinton brought this epipen thing to light and condemned the drug company that hiked these prices. I haven't heard Dinald Trump react yet.
But its a big problem. These things have been around like 20 years, I think. Its not a drug company recooping research money, its profiteering off the backs of sick poor people who may need these things to save their lives.
This is an increasing problem in America. I have an eye condition that every so often requires the use of steroid eye drops. 15 years ago, the brand name was $100 a bottle or so, but you could get the generic for $15-$25, depending on the pharmacy and periodic pricing fluxuations. Now the generic is $115 or more some places, and some insurance plans won't cover it for no good reason. I don't see a good reason to get into the details publically, but I developed a work around that gets me a substitute that works less well and has more side effects, but that relies on things that people generally would not be able to do, and compromises my health care when I have to do it, but is better than going without and risking permanent eye damage and eventual blindness, which is what most poor people in that situation would have to do.
We need government run single payer health care. Everyone gets care paid for by tax dollars. Drug companies get the prices the government negotiates with them, and governments get the leverage because the drug companies need to sell to this market, so they'd be able to get better prices. Do it like Canada or the United Kingdom. It mat have some issues associated with it, but its the right thing to do. If drug companies complain that they can't or won't research and development into new treatments as a result, have the government fund research universities and get patent rights out of it that belong to the people of the nation, and then lend the patent to the bidder who promises the lowest costs.
You know right now we fund joint research that leads to new medicines, and then let the companies have the patents for free and charges hubdreds or thousands of dollars to suffering and even terminal patients for the next 17 years until the patent expires? Crazy and immoral. If the government funds research and development on behalf of the American people, the patent should belong to the government on behalf of the American people and we should find a way to get it to people for cheap even if we have to make it ourselves. The drug companies can take a long walk off a short peer. Their business model is largely inmoral.
