A house and 401k are both illiquid and thus irrelevant to your economic bargaining power. If you're upper-middle class then sure your liquid funds might be in a brokerage account, but if you're lower-middle it's likely just a savings account where you're working on building an emergency fund.

I can get liquidity out of my 401k trivially by borrowing against it. A home equity loan takes a bit more time but it's also simple to do. If you're lower middle class you most likely don't have any money in your savings account at all[1], but you do have debt which gets diluted by inflation.

Also, to your earlier point:

> Poor people don't have standing debts but rather revolving ones, and so their debt scales with inflation.

So at worst that's a wash.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...