One way to tell if someone is smarter than you is if they are continually taking actions that appear stupid to you, yet which keep working out for them for reasons that appear like luck.
If everyone from people earning $10 an hour to people earning 120K a year are living "paycheck to paycheck", then it seems misguided to think that the solution somehow lies on the wage side rather than paying attention to the consumption side and the issues of modern capitalist marketing.
The problem with modern American society is that it's developed a superbly optimized form of hyper-capitalism that is able to suck in every single marginal dollar while not delivering meaningful improvements in quality of life.
Areas of the economy that don't operate on that arena (food, electronics, clothing etc.) follow standard deflation curves and get drowned out by the areas of the economy that do.
Take children's safety for example. As a parent, you are expected to buy exactly up to your level of social status in marginal safety improvements for your kids, despite almost no tangible return on investment. If you are a working class family, your kids go to school on their own in a school bus and are latchkey kids in the afternoon while you finish your shift but if you are middle class, you're expected to ferry your kids to every single engagement because "what if something happens to them" and you have to participate in every hare brained exercise in child-rearing on the off chance that it adds some iota of chance to their success. Not doing so not only immediately makes you an outcast in every single social circle, in many cases, busybodies can also bring to bear the power of the state to compel you to behave or childhood services will be brought in to rip your child away from you.
With colleges, families stretch to send their child to the "best" college the child gets into, even if there are plenty of perfectly acceptable colleges for a quarter of the price. If you send your child to the best college, then at least you can reassure yourself that you've done everything you can whereas if you go for the "budget" option, you're forever going to be plagued with the thought of "what if?"
The American cultural pathological fear of every talking about or confronting death leads to the same thing with healthcare. If you have $100K in savings and a parent/loved one is suffering from some medical issue not covered by insurance, you will spend all $100K of that accumulated savings on experimental, last ditch efforts to save them. If you have $500K in savings, you will spend that $500K on a different set of treatments to save them. If you have $500K in savings, it would be morbidly unthinkable to only spend $100K of it and then look your loved one in the eye and tell them you think you're ready to watch them die now. Note that this would be the case even if the $500K treatment was no better or ever worse in outcome than the $100K treatment.
In Economics, there is a theoretical concept of price discrimination where the absolute maximum profit you could ever get from a product is to have some kind of mind reader device that could ascertain the exact maximum amount every single person is willing to pay and charge them exactly that amount for the product. Childcare, education, healthcare & real estate have ballooned in cost because the marketing of American society has become exquisitely tuned to do exactly this.
It doesn't matter how immune you are to this marketing message or how much you would like to reject it, this is marketing that works on a societal level to socially punish any individual who does not willingly give every single marginal dollar to some nebulous notion of the "better life".
Even if we could wave some magic wand and double everybody's wages (in real terms), you would not see any substantial increase in quality of life because those extra dollars would just be absorbed into even more pointless medical tests, fancy college campuses, increased land prices and bullshit helicopter parenting.
