> 80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority.
Do you have a citation to support these claims? A cursory search yielded a study that showed at least from 1995-2005 these claims were completely false, and the majority of people moved up from the lowest quintiles of the economy.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...
> The cost of everything necessary is rising[2]
If you look at your reference this is also false. Some necessities are flat, some have gone up. And most of the necessities like food and housing that have gone up, at least according to your reference, have tracked inflation so in real terms have not gone up and hence we should not feel like flat wage growth has reduced the availability of these necessities to the people who are economically immobile. And of course, in real terms, clothing and other necessities have gotten cheaper. You also gloss over that non-essential items that improve quality of life like tech have dropped radically, increasing the overall purchasing power of people within those spheres over time.
The remaining items like medical care and college education cited are cause for concern, but if we're being honest both of those areas are effectively in a state of crisis right now due to out of control costs, broken systems, and predatory lending practices. On the education front at least there is cause for hope due to the increasing availability of alternatives.
You paint a particularly bleak picture that is not backed up by your own sources, I'm afraid. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement in income mobility in the US or reducing the costs and waste in systems like healthcare, but like I said there are plenty of reasons for optimism and a belief that the trajectory is a positive one.