The War on the Middle Class
Wage stagnation and inflation underpin the degrowth agenda of the WEF and are destroying the middle class
I’d like to open with a sentimental snatch of song from “I Dreamed a Dream” from my favourite musical – Les Misérables:
There was a time when men were kind,
And their voices were soft,
And their words inviting.
There was a time when love was blind,
And the world was a song,
And the song was exciting.
There was a time when it all went wrong.
…
I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die,
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
…
But the tigers come at night,
With their voices soft as thunder,
As they tear your hope apart,
And they turn your dream to shame.
…
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living,
So different now from what it seemed...
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
Although Fantine was singing about lost love, and the deterioration of her working class life as a young and abandoned mother in early 19th Century France, the words ring true now not so much for the salty underbelly of society – who it can be credibly argued, having experienced a brief period of upward mobility in the past 150 years, have now lost all optimism and are largely content to subsist on KFC and Netflix, grinding away in the rent trap until cancer or heart disease carries them off – but to that great bastion of liberal ‘democracy’, and from whence most of my readership derives: the middle class.
Such words as I’ve quoted above were once the lament of the downtrodden working class. They are now becoming the woeful siren song of the middle class also.
By way of example, I’d like to share with you two receipts I’ve come into possession of in the past week. These two bills illustrate two facets of middle-class life: one, the day-to-day; and another, the getaway. Two extremes, but both of which tell the same sad and outrageous story, and it is in their complete congruity that I see the big picture upon which the title of this essay is based.
Here now is my most recent grocery bill:
You may wish to peruse it, or simply take my word for it – but what you are looking at here is a very modest shop, so much so that I carried it a kilometre home on foot, in two paper bags (because we’re not allowed to use sturdy plastic bags anymore – because we plebs must ‘save the planet’ while the elites jet off to Davos every January in carbon-belching private jets to concoct more ways for us, their minions, to tighten our belts). What you are looking at is about a four menial dinners’ worth of food, four sparse lunches, plus some eggs, cheese, and sundry snacks, as well basic staples like toilet paper and rubbish bags.
This small haul of groceries, from a large chain supermarket (enough food for about a week’s worth of very modest meals for one) cost $102.54.
I am fortunate that I don’t have dependant children to feed, a large mortgage and a car to service, and that I earn a marginally respectable income – and yet this grocery bill still stings. Having been doing my own weekly shopping now for over two decades I can tell you emphatically, without needing to provide evidence (for I’m sure your own recent experience in this regard necessitates none) that a mere four years ago (pre-COVID) this bill would have been up to 50% cheaper.
Even if we take a more forgiving approach (and I am well past the point of forgiveness when it comes to the technocrats who daily inflate our monetary supply) we could say that pre-COVID this bill might have been about $70. That still represents over a 40% increase in the cost of groceries.
I have been harping on this for two years now, and while I take no pleasure in it, I called this inflation thing well before anyone in my daily periphery could see it. I recall the sardonic and patronising smiles I received from colleagues and some friends at the time – “Oh there goes JJ again, doom-mongering.”
Well, friends and associates – I was right. And here we are now, paying at least 30% more for food than we were in 2020.
I claim no special intelligence or insight here. Many thousands of others saw exactly what I did coming down the pipeline – including scores of online influencers and bloggers, most of whom were swiftly cancelled, silenced, and shadow-banned for daring to question the wisdom of our great and all-knowing mandarins as they brazenly pulled the lever on the money printer and inflated the dollar supply by many tens of trillions, ostensibly to keep us safe from a virus with a 99.98% survival rate.
And when the COVID sham ran thin, they devised a new reason to keep printing – Ukraine. And now it’s Israel-Gaza… and what tomorrow, and what the day after? On, and on, and on it goes as our money becomes less and less valuable and the entire lunatic system totters closer and closer to the brink of complete collapse.
Now all this would be fine, if there was sufficient growth underpinning the inflation of the money supply, but there is not. In fact, it is the exact opposite. The money supply increases, and growth slows. And small wonder! The suffocating restrictions and regulations of the Net Zero agenda (whether intentionally or otherwise – and you should know very well which hook I hang that particular hat on) render no other economic outcome possible.
Some have called it a controlled demolition; others, a managed decline – but if you’d like to really dive amongst the weeds on this issue I recommend James Lindsay’s excellent talk on ‘Degrowth’.
But what it all boils down to is stagnant wage growth for the working and middle classes, and an ever-increasing cost of living. It’s as simple as that.
Not to lament my own situation, for although I am feeling the pinch (especially since taking on the full burden of rent for my apartment now that my ex and I are no longer sharing bills), and while I humbly acknowledge there many millions doing it way tougher than me in the West alone – I have not had a meaningful pay rise in the past five years, despite having risen in seniority in my organisation and taken on extra roles and responsibilities not outlined in my job description – during which time, the rate of inflation has dwarfed my paltry pay increases by at least 50% - probably much more, all told.
Before I go on, I’d like to share with you the second abovementioned receipt – this one from a five-star hotel in Australia’s Gold Coast. This was sent to me today by a friend who is staying at the Langham for a work conference and wanted a couple of beers and a grilled cheese sandwich brought to his room:
As you can see, two Heinekens, plus two bits of bread, a smattering of cheese, a couple of slivers of ham and slice of tomato cost a grand total of $74. Again, we see the same obscene level of inflation and, while I cannot claim to be a jetsetter who has spent half his life in four or five-star hotels, I have taken enough vacations and enough weekend getaways in my time to once gain emphatically tell you that this bill, four years ago would have been only about $40 – almost 50% cheaper.
You may well be wondering why I’m bringing up luxury accommodation here, and what that has to do with the price of fish for the average Joe… I’ll come to that, but first let me break down this absurd room service bill.
$15 per beer, for a total of $30. Pre-COVID you’d be looking at $11-12.
But it’s the food and the mysterious “tray charge” that really blows my mind…
$36 dollars for a toasted sandwich! which, I am reliably informed was basically inedible, so dry and measly were the ingredients, and furthermore, served by surly and unhelpful staff.
And what of the “tray charge”??
$8! For… reasons!! as the kids like to say… An entirely arbitrary and meaningless charge akin to the ‘service fee’ that UberEats introduced a couple of years ago, and the 1-3% transaction fees that we now pay on virtually every electronic purchase (which, by the way, we are forced to make because hardly any shop will accept cash now).
It reminds me of the last two or three hotel stays I’ve experienced where, unlike pre-COVID times, they now charge you for a bucket of ice! Up to $15 dollars per bucket in some cases! On my last real holiday (in July last year) I resorted to trudging down from our suite at the Palazzo Versace in Gold Coast to the local bottle shop and lugging great bags of ice back up to the room to keep the drinks cool, such was the obscene expense of ordering a bucket from the kitchen – at $5 a bag from the store it was a no brainer, compared to the 200% markup (and previously non-existent price tag) that the hotel was charging.
So why am I thundering away at the luxury hotel industry? Surely this is not in keeping with the somewhat humble and basic persona I’ve cultivated thus far in my writing?
I’ll tell you why:
Because, my friends, a few nights at a five-star hotel is not (or at least was not) a thing of luxury for most middle-class folk up until very recently. It was, in fact, if one were that way inclined, quite an affordable and indeed reasonable thing to do if you saved your pennies and fancied a few days away from home in pleasant and commodious surrounds.
Yes, most of us saved the big holidays for places like Bali, or perhaps Thailand – places you could go for two weeks or more on a budget of $5000 or even less. But for many of us in the middle stratum of society, the occasional getaway at a five-star hotel, was a treat we enjoyed from time to time. It allowed us to pretend, for the briefest of time, that the world was a song, and the song was exciting.
You see, here’s the thing about high-end hotels. They were not built for rich people. They were built for the middle class. Most rooms will cost you between $300 and $600 a night – a range that is affordable, on a brief and infrequent basis, for any single person or couple on a modest-to-good income. Yes, naturally these edifices house luxury penthouses and suites with plunge pools, grand vistas, and multiple bedrooms also where the real rich folk stay when they’re in town, but these accommodations make up maybe only 2% of the hotel’s capacity. Most rooms are there for the middle class, who come and go, either by way of vacation or business trip, and upon this clientele have these businesses survived for perhaps the past hundred years or more.
But this is increasingly no longer the case.
I vent spleen on this particular tangent as the little three-night hotel mini-break was one of the few things I still enjoyed about my middle-class life until very recently, and the room service bill I shared above simply serves to remind me once more of the erosion of our standard of living – to say nothing of the day-to-day inflation we experience, and which hits us where it really hurts: in our fridges and pantries.
I made the following prediction to the aforementioned friend (not that it takes any great prescience at this point, such has been the manifest deterioration of every service and hospitality industry these past four years):
Hotels will become more expensive and less commodious for all but the super-rich. Sandwiches will rise from $36 dollars to $40, and from thence to $50. The ‘tray charge’ will increase from $8 to $15, and then to $20. At some point they’ll cut off room service to the lower order units altogether and one will be required to go down to the one understaffed and barely functioning restaurant for meals which one will then carry back up to one’s room in UberEats-style bags – while the great and good look down, smirking from the exclusive mezzanine bar and eatery.
Eventually the restaurants will disappear altogether and one will actually need to order UberEats to the lobby if one is disinclined to dine out.
Eventually (and indeed already) such places will become nothing more than stacks of fancy rooms, sporting an ever-decreasing complimentary housekeeping service.
My friend who is currently staying at the Langham tells me the housekeeping now only comes once every two days… When did that happen? This is the Gold Coast’s preeminent hotel! He also tells me they have now closed their restaurant for everything but dinner, meaning lunch and breakfast are out…
What the hell is going on here?
You may yet be wondering why I’m so up in arms about the hotel issue. Don’t get me wrong, I can live without this little luxury. My issue is that I see this as warning sign and an omen of worse times to come – the first whisper of wind of a momentous storm if you like.
When grand and long-enduring businesses such as classy tourist hotels can no longer make ends meet to the point where they are charging $15 for a bucket of frozen water, and charging an additional $8 for a bellboy to walk it up to your room, and discontinuing breakfast and lunch service, and scaling back their housekeeping to once every two days – it is a sign that the middle class is running out of money.
Let me reiterate: Hotels like the Langham, the Sheraton, and even the Versace (whose Gold Coast location closed down in August last year, by the way) were not built for rich people – they were built for the middle class. The true rich… they don’t need hotels; they don’t even need luxury resorts – they have their own private islands.
Eventually the hotels will disappear altogether, as too will regular commercial air travel, the tourism industry itself, restaurants, cafes, and other middleclass attractions that have for so long sustained and distracted us from our daily toil in service to The Machine. For as I have said before, The Machine no longer needs us – that is to say, our happiness and comfort do not feature in their grand agenda.
If you think I’m being dramatic, I urge you again to listen to James Lindsay’s talk on ‘Degrowth’ and hear what the elites of Davos have in store for us.
And if you still don’t believe me, or think I’m prattling on like a brat, bitching and moaning about the state of the ‘luxury’ hotel industry, then simply look at your grocery bill – and tell me they’re not waging a war on the middle class.
Run the numbers and compare them to your real wage growth these past four years and tell me that you did not once have a dream your life would be so different, and indeed that modern life has not killed the dream you dreamed.