Until the Great Society we did not have a permanent lower class. There are some exception but for the most part people may find themselves in circumstances that they would be listed as being poor, but in time they rose out of that category.
We just have a “Gilded cage slave class” that replaced chains with other people’s fiat money in exchange for keeping the middle class down because the control freaks and elites live by the mantra that competition is a sin....
Huh!