As a side note, this is really bad for lower income individuals and families. A larger percentage of their income goes towards food and energy than a higher income individual/family. Not only are a lot of them dealing with mortgage issues and tighter credit availability - now they need to deal with this.

Not really. Not immediately, anyway. Low income people often have more debt than wealth, making inflation beneficial. The people who are genuinely hurt are those on non-inflation-indexed pensions, and those of us with savings or inappropriate investments (long term bonds, for example).

Most low income working people I know avoid debt like the plague - with the exception of car loans and house loans, which low and middle income people pretty much approach the same way, but just purchasing at varying price levels.

Just to be clear, I'm comparing low and middle income families. That said, low income people do spend a larger percentage of their money on food and energy as compared to middle income families (since everyone needs to feed themselves, keep themselves warm and go places).

I think students would be the only exception to this...but I'd guess they're an exception, as they are taking out debt because they know their future earnings are going to go up in the long run.

Edit: However I do see what you're saying in terms of upper income people losing money tied to investments due to inflation. But I'm just saying, all else equal, for a zero-debt lower income household vs a zero-debt middle income household (of which there exist many), the lower one is going to get hit hard by this.