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The unproductive (non-tax paying, entitlement-dependent) class has every incentive to avoid risky actions and passively hope the Savior State can continue supporting them, even as the gulf between the State's promises and what it actually delivers widen.

The productive (taxpaying) class has an ever-diminishing incentive to support the status quo: as taxes, junk fees and the cost of the FEW essentials rise (food, energy and water), the Savior State has every incentive to cut entitlements to the middle class and increase taxes to maintain the State and Plutocracy's shares of national income.

In sum: the State can buy the passive complicity of the unproductive class and the active support of the Plutocracy, but the middle class stake in the system is far more problematic: "belief in the system" is the core of middle class compliance. The middle class has to believe that the increasingly obvious inequalities and Savior State/Plutocracy excesses are counterbalanced by the wealth, prestige and "good life" to be earned by laboring for the status quo. But once middle class wealth, income, security and confidence that this is fact "the good life" irrevocably erode, then the middle class "belief in the system" fades.

The only real defense the State can muster against this devolution is propaganda (the system serves your interests, it is the finest system in the world, your sacrifice is necessary, etc.) and punishment for those who question/resist.

The productive middle class can choose a path between complacency and risk-laden resistance: they can opt out.

The spectrum of ways to opt out is appealingly broad; one can work less hours, refuse the overworked/underpaid nightmare of supervisory positions, quit and start a small business in the cash/barter economy, take less demanding work for much less pay, offer services in trade for what services one needs or exit the high-cost urban lifestyle entirely and learn to live on extremely modest sums of cash money.

Having been raised to place a high premium on their own value as cogs in the machine, and perhaps on creativity and self-fulfillment as well, the productive middle class also has the choice to organize a political response to their ever-decreasing share of the national income.

This presents an insoluble double-bind to the State and Plutocracy partnership: they desperately need the middle class to "believe in the system:" to doggedly work as cogs in the increasingly unequal machine and pay enormous taxes and fees to the State while remaining docile and politically compliant.

But to actually increase the middle classes' relative share of the dwindling national income would require choosing between the intolerable--a relative reduction in State/Elite income--and the unpalatable-- arousing the passively dependent underclass by slashing their minimal bread and circuses benefits.

Yet as the gap between the reality of impending insolvency and the strained "happy story" promulgated by the Plutocracy's mass media (supporting the status quo is in your self-interest, etc.) and the not-so-veiled threats of the State (keep silent and pay up or else) widens to an unbridgeable chasm, the middle class is reluctantly roused from its complacent slumber.

The State cannot afford to alienate its middle class worker-bees/taxpayers/voters but neither can it reduce its own share of the national income or take income from the Plutocracy. Their response to middle class discontent will be more of the same but at a higher pitch: more frenzied propaganda, more simulacrum "reforms," more promises that these "reforms" will fix the crumbling system, and beneath the propaganda, more stringent enforcement of rules punishing those worker-bees who step out of line or who avoid their heavy tax burdens.

The game of managing declining national income and an ever more burdened productive class is fraught with risks, and the State's undoing is its over-reach and parasitic partnership with the Plutocracy: in protecting their share of the declining national income as the expense of the middle class, they drive