Most of the poor and middle (spare me the lecture about how someone grossing 200k+ is middle because they're unwilling to suffer a longer commute or live where

Most of the poor and middle (spare me the lecture about how someone grossing 200k+ is middle because they're unwilling to suffer a longer commute or live where the schools are slightly worse) don't have a mortgage on a house. Those that do don't tend to have them in the trendy places being pumped full of urban monopoly money. And even then if you need a roof over your head you can't sell because then you'd get screwed right back out of any earnings by having to buy back in. Cashing out and moving to BFE is harder if you're more chained to a particular locale because of support network or a particular job/industry. Also if you're middle class or poor then there's now fewer BFE's within your budget thanks to covid and remote work. Student debt is a thing but the amounts and repayment rates are so low nobody was hurting that much anyway (the guy who's 60k in the red for a journalism degree is not in any way typical). Even with stupidly high inflation a car loan will never make you money because you can't liquidate because you'd need to buy back in. If you've got credit card debt or a payday loan or something else with a stupid high interest rate then anything short of Venezuela levels of inflation doesn't really help you. You get marginally less screwed but in the bigger picture you get more screwed because your day to day cash-flow is worse making the payments harder even if they're shrinking relatively The only people being helped by debt being inflated away didn't need the help to begin wit. Everyone else is being screwed because any savings they have will go poof and their standard of living will be knocked down because wages always lag inflation. A little inflation is fine/good but enough inflation that people are feeling the squeeze in the short term (you'd have to be blind to social media to not see this is the case) is too much.