I suppose there is some truth to this. Elsewhere in this thread I quote a sharp observation by ChuckMcM which I find tragically applicable to the current Americ

I suppose there is some truth to this. Elsewhere in this thread I quote a sharp observation by ChuckMcM which I find tragically applicable to the current American poltical-economic system: Rich people demanding higher returns, enslave unsuspecting youth through their loan seller proxies. But it's not even rich people demanding higher returns. As Planet Money observed in what I consider a seminal piece for understanding the 2008 financial crisis, The Giant Pool of Money, what helped precipitate the bubble and collapse was institutional investors demanding a simple reliable 3% ROI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/355/the-giant-pool-of-money https://www.thisamericanlife.org/355/the-giant-pool-of-money After Greenspan had warned money managers not to expect the US government to provide it with T-bills any more, Wall Street stepped forward with their innovation: NINJA loans, ARMs, CDOs, and the other crap covered in The Big Short. These had the effect of inventing new ways for everyone, but especially working and middle-class people, to go into debt to cushion returns for a wealthier investor class. Just as many people who traditionally would have never gone to college can now go to college by taking on huge nearly unmanageable amounts of debt, people who would have never bought a house before were sold the illusion of being able to afford a house -- by taking on huge unmanageable amounts of debt. So yes, I agree, more millionaires fattens the right side of the tail. But it still seems to come at the expense, and the exploitation, of their down-class fellow citizens. I also doubt that this new class of millionaires is evenly distributed geographically and the resentment being bred among, for example, Trump supporters, has less to do with observing the local Rockefellers tooling around town in their limousines, than watching the Kardashians on television and, nowadays, Potemkin Lifestyle Celebrities on Instagram.