It's a beautiful system where not only do the poor get to suffer, but their suffering allows the wealthy to luxuriate in perceived moral superiority.

This is silly and infantilizing. You can walk down any street in any of the many non-depressed area of the US and see a parade of bad financial decisions driving by in the form of newish $30k+ cars, along with a number of $50k+ pickup trucks, doubtless financed with debt. No one here is talking about people who can't afford food, he's talking about a much larger percentage of the population that makes an objectively large amount of money and still doesn't save nearly any of it.

People in the US are, on average, not nearly as frugal as they should be, and the sorry state of savings in this country is at least partly due to those habits. Even people with 6 figure take home salaries frequently are only a few months of savings away from financial ruin or tapping their retirement savings, if they lose their job. For them, it's a planning and discipline problem, not a problem of some evil system keeping them down.

It's way better than that: at the extremes the deep poverty of the poorest earns more money through usurious credit for the rich too.