Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Is the Middle Class Becoming Extinct?" video.

@mattabouttrails Choices, which are informed, by what we're being told left and right! What was the mantra from our parents and greater society for the last forty years? Get a degree, you'll earn a better salary. How much has cost of education increased over that same period of time? Education, which is mandatory to enter certain fields, including trades! (you need a university degree and couple of years of working practice, or school leaving exam and more years of working experience, to become self employed electrician in Czechia. University degree and more years of working experience to become a safety inspector in said field) As for housing, not every employer is willing to let you work remote and earn a decent salary, so you can operate from home, meaning even that choice is note entirely in the hands of an employee and where self employed entrepreneur does not have much more space to work either.
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Ordinary citizens don't have more capacity to save and invest. Unless one already owns a home, they are subject to landlords, which can workout or even demand disclosure, how much money a person makes, and set their rent at such a level, that the tenant can't ever save for down payment on their own house. The idea here is, that if someone gets a house of their own, even on a fixed mortgage, they'll stabilize the largest expenditure they have month-on-month basis for a number of years, whereas their income should increase over same period of time. Rent on the other side, will increase every year without question (baring rent controls). Then there is transition from owning to operational leasing of goods, which producers, eg. companies are pushing down our throats, sometimes completely disallowing perpetual ownership of a product, or making it ineffective investment (as rule of thumb, investment in a tool should completely return in 5 years), forcing a normal Joe to "rent", what he otherwise could acquire for good year on year. Take MS Office as an example. The government also plays a part in this, forcing people into purchasing less effective and in the long run therefore more expensive services and/or goods. Take electric cars, which are more expensive than conventional ones and will always be more expensive (due to higher volume of refining of greater variety of materials, when compared to normal cars), which are currently pushed by governments, in order to battle climate change. In the past, thanks to relative simplicity of a car, one could fix them himself, lowering total cost of ownership of an asset (yes car is an asset, in spite of whatever financial gurus are saying. Car gives you greater range to access either net lower priced housing or higher paying job), when compared to modern cars and especially electric cars, allowing them to retain greater amount of wealth by "working on their own", which incentivized longer period of ownership of said asset. This has gotten less and less possible, due to increased complexity of cars, which culminated in EVs, where owner could prevented from even learning, how to fix their car under pretense of safety. To illustrate, my grandfather owned and drove the same car for twenty years and fixed everything on it himself. That is unthinkable with a modern car and impossible with an EV, because after twenty years, battery of that EV would be completely dead and that is the most expensive component of that car! Even modern cars with internal combustion engines have become so complex, an individual without very specialized and therefore expensive tools, can't touch anything on their own cars, forcing that person to seek out services of a certified mechanic, often times controlled by car manufacturer, who retains a part of mechanics profit through access to knowledge base and tools necessary to fix the car. (I'm looking at you John Deer, I'm looking at you!) These rent seeking practices lower a persons ability to retain wealth, hence contribute to greater economic inequality.
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