alt Hacker NewsI don't know if it's irrelevant. The rich are only rich after all because there's everyone else. If there weren't millions of poor people who have not much choice but to work for nothing in other countries, the rich wouldn't be so rich. If there weren't poor people to get into deep credit card debt and overspending, the rich wouldn't be so rich.
Although it's not popular to say so, the entire system is acting here and it can't readily be decoupled. Even when it comes to flying - the rich wouldn't do so much flying if there weren't poor people working for nothing in resorts and gig work in tourism.
That's not to say I think poor people are to blame. But it does mean that increasing the number of poor and their resulting desperation gives the rich something to feed off of.
Poor people don't buy stuff, they don't make rich people rich. The global poor are also pretty useless as labor too in this modern economy: the bottom billion of the population are mostly illiterate. The The global poor also don't have credit so can't overspend.
(The American poor are solidly upper middle class by global standards)