That's just for the hypothetical streaming agency. When you add up all these little increases of just about every good and compare that to wage growth, you see that wages are stagnating relative to other metrics like cost of living or business/national productivity, in the US or the UK or just about anywhere with these sort of metrics available. You can raise minimum wages to fend of a total economic collapse every now and then but these increases find their way to these other hands reaching into your pocket before long as well. A constant sucking noise and a march to what, I'm not sure, but it won't be pretty I expect.
Then came deregulation. Within five years, PG&E went bankrupt.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...
It's not like deregulation was the only issue, that just accelerated the bullshit. PG&E had neglected ("deferred") maintenance for many decades - the deadly 2018 wildfire was caused by a cable hook that was around a century old and had never been inspected for a very VERY long time until it eventually failed [1]. IMHO, that amount of maintenance neglect should have been classified as financial fraud:
> PG&E has said in recent court filings it didn’t track when its hooks were installed or how long they had been exposed to weather. It also didn’t routinely inspect them to look for corrosion or wear. Before the Camp Fire, PG&E inspection forms didn’t even include space to note the condition of hooks and other hardware.
How PG&E dared to pay dividends when they didn't even know how much liabilities they had on the books, that is just utterly insane.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-old-metal-hook-could-deter...
The world is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly run by people who own things for a living.
These two sources of income (or capital gains -- heaven forbid we tax our rich like we tax our plebs) lead to highly distinct and often directly opposed objective functions. The extent to which this leads to a self-serving policy spiral for the rich is a function of the degree to which the inhabited-by/run-by distinction is true: with a steep enough wealth distribution, yeah, it's fair for people at the bottom to say that people at the top actually are all colluding.
The self-serving policy spiral doesn't look like "Lidl hikes prices and Tesco doesn't, so you can just shop at Tesco," it looks like "merger approved between Lidl and Tesco, now listen to the surviving PR department tell you how this will surely save you money."