This is exactly it. All of the other answers in this thread are dancing around this issue without even knowing it. Some happen upon it, but move on like it’s a side item when it should instead be lit up with lights and sirens as the main event.

Regular people spend the majority of their income on the things they need to survive; food, shelter, energy, clothing, etc. The wealthy and ultra wealthy spend only a miniscule fraction of their money on the same things, so they put that pile of remaining money into investments/assets (stocks/shares, housing, etc), which make them even more money, which they put into more assets which make them even more money, and so on. But the money flowing to them doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from YOU.

Collectively speaking, you go to buy a home, they outcompete you on the price, and then gladly rent it to you, all while jacking up the rent over time. They use that extra money from you to buy even more assets. You somehow manage to buy a home, but at a highly inflated price, the money is lent to you by… guess who. And they charge you interest every month, which is money flowing from you, so they can spend it on… even more assets.

Higher prices at the corporate owned grocery store because the shareholders demand even more dividends. Because goods at the store coming from corporate producers raised the price for the same reason. Because little producers that used to compete in the market are being bought up by big ones that can afford it because they pay next to no corporate tax. But who are the shareholders receiving the dividends? 80% (and rising) of the stock market is owned by the 1%, the people who already have more money than they could ever spend.

Now we’ve got higher prices for energy for a multitude of reasons, but a fresh new hell is it’s all being gobbled to power data centers. Whose ultimate purpose is an attempt to replace people’s jobs with “thinking” computers. Whether they’ll succeed or not is yet to be seen, but we do know it is being funded by billions of dollars that someone has… guess who again. If they do succeed, then that’s even more money sucked away from you in the form of lower wages at minimum. If it blows up in a catastrophic bubble, they will demand a bailout again, just like the sub prime bubble.

Our failure to tax the obscenely rich allows them to walk all over us, taking money from us which they use to build the machinery to walk all over us with even greater pressure, which takes even more money from us, and so on. It’s literally exponential, which is why nobody appreciates nor understands it.

You are not rich, will never be rich. The ones who actually are, are doing everything they can to keep you out of their club. You’ll know because you’ll be paying taxes and they won’t. Which are going to go up soon by the way, to pay for that bailout.