There's more to wealth than money. I don't even mean that as some sort of hippy "all you need is love" sort of thing, I mean it's true in real life. A person who has multiple options to make $30,000/yr is better off that a person who has only one, who is still better off than someone who is getting $30,000/yr from the government, and is thus completely subject to their whims and bureaucracy. There's also significant differences between these when scaled to the societal level, between a robust society, a fragile society, and a society where the government is now master of the people rather than the other way around. For the fragile case, for instance, consider the automotive industry in Michigan, where a lot of people saw their one good option drop to zero.

Money is only one component of wealth. Unless you have the "fuck you" money (in local parlance), it's not enough on its own to be "wealthy". I think even trained economists can forget this sometimes.