You said that the working middle class craps on the poor. In what way? Are you meaning how we treat lower wage workers or how we seem to hate entitlement programs (unless they are aimed at us, obvs) or something else?

capncaptain:

Both, though what caused the rant was the indignation at the poor using government assistance.

Ok. I think I can answer that. The working class get lucky when we have the right connections or the right privileges at the right time. But we don’t want to believe that luck has anything to do with it - because then we aren’t where we are because of our own volition. So we take luck out of the equation and tell ourselves that we have our jobs because of hard work, and our awesome abilities of bootstrap pulling. If we can do it, then there’s no reason why poor people can’t do it too! It must be because they’re just too darn lazy to put in the work themselves. And the sentiment that goes something like this: “How dare they (said as if poor people aren’t actually humans) take money away from my family in the form of these government assistance programs - I worked for my money, not to just give it away to people who are just too lazy to get a real job!”

There’s also a lot of goal-post moving. If you’re unemployed, then you need to take any job in order to stop mooching off the taxpayers. But then if you get a minimum wage job, and still qualify for assistance, then you need extra jobs, or you should have went to college. Oh, you went to college but you’re still only working minimum wage jobs? Well, you must have got a degree in something useless, like liberal arts. Oh, you got a degree in something useful? Well, you maybe you should have got a masters degree then. Oh, you got a masters and now people won’t hire you because they’d have to pay you too much or they think you’ll leave as soon as a better opportunity presents itself…. it just goes on and on.

Getting a good, high-paying job and being in the working middle class has a whole lot to do with just blind luck, your specific set of privelges and being in the right set of circumstances more than anything else.