I live in a middle-class neighborhood with aspirations. It is made up of seventy-five-year-old houses on small lots, but many of them have received or are undergoing serious surgeries to bump out the back, go up a story or otherwise expand their size and modernize their amenities – often bigger kitchens and baths and closets.

Those neighbors who aren’t retired go off each day to earn the loot needed to pay the mortgage and the taxes, to upgrade the appliances and put the kids though school. But their homes don’t stand empty or idle in their absence. Oh no. As the owners toil at desks, in front of computer screens, an army of visitors invade the neighborhood, clotting the streets and driveways with trucks and trailers and vans and equipment.

There are yardmen mowing and trimming and filling the air with the high-pitched whine of various machines. There are heating and air conditioning workers doing season tune-ups or repairing broken units or installing thousands of dollars’ worth of new gear. In my youth it seemed as if a furnace lasted from my birth until I left home 25 years later, when it was still going strong. Kitchen appliance, same story. Out of fashion, perhaps, but hanging in there.

Now these machines, ever so much more sophisticated with electronic features to connect them to the internet, memorize my wishes and perform operations I don’t understand and never asked for, are of a far more delicate constitution. The old-fashioned appliances of yesteryear were long-lived pieces of iron that had the staying power of Galapagos tortoises. The effete machines of today seem to die like mayflies, shortly after their brief warranties expire.

So the street is jammed six days a week with new appliances being delivered like newborns, the corpses of the old being carted away or repairmen with the appliance equivalent of stethoscopes and MRIs and EKGs trying to diagnosis the source of the trouble afflicting the patient. Nine times out of ten it’s a faulty circuit board. It probably cost ten cents to make in China but costs $248.50 to replace. Might as well buy a new washer, dryer, freezer, fridge, or mangle.

The parade of tradespeople also includes painters (interior and exterior), paper-hangers, roofers, carpenters and bug catchers trailing clouds of carcinogens. It is hard to keep count of the numberless visits of caregivers, not to mention their perpetually arriving bills. Alarm systems, cable systems, floor sanders, carpet layers. The homeowner’s pageant of needs never ceases.I don’t want to live in a shack in the woods, but now and again I begin to feel Thoreau was on to something when he said: “How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!” In our case, it’s a two-story, three-bedroom, with cracks in the foundation, leaks in the pipes and the next repair forever on the horizon.

Maybe Trump and Gates, and Zuckerberg and the Kochs have so many billions that such incessantly multiplying expenses amount to mere rounding errors. Maybe my neighbors are all more prosperous than I am, probably they are. But maybe like me, their backs are bowed under the weight of residential upkeep. Judging by my little microcosm of America, wealth distribution is alive and well and the government has nothing to do with it. It would be comical if it weren’t so costly.

All these upper middle class men and women in suits schlepping off to keep the wheels of industry turning or to remove gall bladders or to file lawsuits or divorce paper or estate plans, these doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs with advanced degrees watch their money go out as soon as it comes in.

Where does it go? To the tinker, the tailor, the candlestick maker who maybe went to community college or took shop in high school and learned something useful like how to snake out a clogged pipe or lay tile. At night when they head home, they get to drink a beer and watch football on the 60-inch big screen TV they installed themselves. They don’t have to get on the phone to talk about the risk or global competition to their widget works or worry about complying with the latest insurance rules covering gall bladder removal or frantically prepare the appeal in the Frobisher action.

Unlike the white collar guys who stay up nights worrying about Little Jimmy getting up his SAT numbers so he can get into an upper echelon school so he can become a doctor, lawyer or merchant chief himself, the kids of the tinker and tailor are already parts of the business, without any student debt. And when something blows up at home, they don’t have to pay some guy in a van the hourly rate to fix it. They do it themselves. If there’s a class war going on, it is no longer clear which side is winning.