This is what people mean when they say that Americans have no class consciousness. If you work for a living you are a proletarian, if you invest for a living you are not. There are a good chunk of people who make well over 6 figures as a salary (lawyers, doctors, etc) that experience pressure from the same type of economic forces as average workers - inflation, cost of education, housing, medical care, childcare, elder care - all of these things are only going one way even if some workers are more insulated from these factors than others. That said this is a bad article and not clear, but there again, some low end writer on yahoo not understanding class in a marxist sense shouldn’t really be a shocker.