Why is this mindcanon? The rich are very much in debt... the "poorest" member of the US house of representatives is something like 15 million dollars in debt, and Donald Trump reportedly is 300M dollars in debt to Deutche Bank. Financial instruments that only the rich have access to (shorts, puts, ETFs) rely on freely available low interest debt to exist in a efficient fashion.

Moreover, when the poor are in debt, assuming they have access to some sort of formal or informal banking services, which many do not, they're usually in debt at short term high interest rates (think low double digits in the case of credit cards for the lower middle class down to 20-30% per annum rates for lending shops for near-poverty and below), which are basically unaffected by nominal debt burden effects of inflation.

If you're spending 90% of your income on day to day needs and there's 1% inflation, that's a ~10% decrease in your margin of survival. If you're spending 20% of your income on day to day needs that's ~1% decrease in your margin of survival.

Now, of course "wages keep up with inflation" or something like that. Except, they don't: (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ - bonus: the divergence kicks in right after nixon closed the gold window), and even if they did, the model that inflation is a policy strategy for correct for sticky wages (https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...) goes out the window.

Inflation exists to silently steal from the poor to give to the rich.