EZ...
Your point is valid -- without the rich, there could be no middle class.
But beyond that, the new strata of corporate "rich" of America (the elite top levels of corporate management), have been overcome by their greed, and by their greed they are choking out the middle class in order to benefit themselves in an obscene manner.
All the workers of any company are those without whom the company would not exist and they are the source of all the company's profits. These are all the manual laborers, factory workers, accountants, sales people, engineers, designers, etc. -- they are the ones who actually make things and do things, and they are the source of all the productivity of the company.
If you look throughout our economic history, as corporate earnings have risen, so have the wages of these workers who do the actual labor, including both the blue and the white collar workers. If you were to look at it on a graph, average corporate earnings would show an uneven, but steady rise over time in our economic history. For most of that time, the average earnings of the workers of those companies (both blue collar and white) rose a little slower, but overall their earnings had maintained a reasonable relationship with corporate earnings. The top management was compensated more highly, but within reason, given their place at the top of the corporate food chain. The big beneficiaries of higher profits were the owners -- the shareholders of the company. That is how it should be, for they are the people who own the company and whose investments are at risk.
In the past 25 or 30 years, though, the average corporate earnings have steepened the curve, while the average earnings of the workers have slowed down, most recently to an almost flat rate, and the difference between the two has not stayed in the corporation to increase shareholders (the owners) equity -- instead, all this extra profit has been plowed into the pockets of the top management of the companies of the companies. What we are seeing is the legalized looting of corporate America by a gang of ultra white collar thieves, driven by greed.
This ever widening disparity of earnings between the management and the workers (and with the shareholders only marginally participating) has resulted in previously unheard of levels of bonuses every year amounting from the tens of millions to approaching the hundreds of millions annually for individual top level managers. The disparity between the income of the blue and white collar workers of a company and the top level of management is far beyond anything even conceivable in the past.
This small cadre of elite level managers are stealing from both the workers and the shareholders (the owners of the company). It is creating a new class of fabulously wealthy people who "earned" their money not by entrepreneurship (the traditional road to great wealth), but by working in collusion with weak boards of directors to loot the company profits.
Such an enormous economic disparity between the workers and the elite wealthy of any nation is the stuff from which revolutions arise -- remember the French and the Russian revolutions. The huge gap between the "haves" and the ordinary people was the driving force in pre-revolutionary France where the rich lived lives of luxury and extravagance while the workers had little -- Marie Antoinette famously said of the poor, "let them eat cake". A society (especially in a democratic republic like our own), cannot long support the kind of disparity of income we now see in corporate America before the "average guy", the blue and white collar workers of corporate America gets angry enough to explode in revolution, and that is especially true when an increasingly Socialist/Marxist style government is soaking all the people, especially the white collar middle class workers, with ever rising tax burdens.
The middle class has always been the backbone of any society, but today the very existence of the middle class in America is in jeopardy. Hopefully, it will be a peaceful revolution led by the workers combined with the shareholders to rid the system of the gangs of thieves who are looting the corporations for their own benefit. That way, the workers will return to getting a fair share of corporate earnings, the top management will get paid fairly, commensurate with their positions, and the shareholders (owners) will get the rest.
If not, the ramifications could be more dire.
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