[quadrangle]

"middle class" is not merely a term for how wealthy people are, it can also mean like professionals who do jobs beyond that of the "working" or "labor" class but are not the capitalist investor/owner class that employs the working class.

The issue of debt used poorly for consumption that isn't investment (e.g. fancy TV), the critique isn't a vague "the system", the critique is that advertisers and sales tactics are very specifically designed to manipulate people into such decisions. But the "system" aspect is about whether the assumptions behind larger investment patterns are set up to basically require that such debt-based consumption happen.

[dragonwriter]

> "middle class" is not merely a term for how wealthy people are, it can also mean like professionals who do jobs beyond that of the "working" or "labor" class

If they live primarily by renting out labor, they are part of the working class (for “intellectual” labor, the proletarian intelligentsia) while if their support comes from a rough balance of capital and labor (especially appyling their own labor to their own capital as independent business operators), they are genuinely part of the middle (petit bourgeois) class, no matter whether the kind of work is the same done by blue-collar laborers or not.