What happens when the majority of people can’t afford ordinary lives?

> Stop drinking kool aid provided by billionaires. You're missing the point. Billionaires may be hoarding money - but what are they *doing* with it? The slow down of growth is real. The pie is not shrinking much, but it's not growing either, which is why they can hoard more and more of it and the result is perceptible. The real question isn't "where do we find the money to pay for X?". It's "if we had the money to pay for X, would we also find the necessary labor and resources that we could pay for with that money?". When things like infrastructure are left on their own devices for as long as they have been, you can't magic them back up simply by throwing banknotes around. It would take time and sustained effort to recover, and it would require prioritizing them over other things; there is only a finite amount of man-hours that can be dedicated to any given enterprise. Billionaires command a lot of money, but do they command a proportionate amount of labor and resources? Not really. They command more than your average person, but they don't personally use that much, beyond a few servants, drivers, valets and what have you. Consider this: imagine Amazon was taken from Jeff Bezos and socialized tomorrow. If we did that, the labour of everyone involved into Amazon would still keep going to Amazon; it is after all a pretty useful service. We'd just socialize the profits of it, probably give the workers better conditions. That's good, but it doesn't free up amounts of resources proportionate to Bezos' wealth. Similarly, if you had more money to pay for the NHS, you could make some things better. But you still need nurses and doctors, and they need to be trained, and whoever becomes a nurse or doctor is someone who can't be something else. Are there all that many unemployed or potential nurses or doctors lying around, waiting to be hired? Not really, unless we talk poaching them from other countries, which benefits the UK but overall is a zero sum game. The growing inequality is a symptom here. The disease is a growth that just isn't there, not at the levels at which we were used to in the 20th century. This does become a bit of a negative feedback loop - more inequality *slows the growth even more* - but I think the biggest cause to begin with is that we simply started running out of the potential that we tapped into in the past decades.