What you need is successive waves of a virus that kills off all your weak and old, useless slaves cough citizens that expect these kinds of benefits/welfare.

Keep a small group of fit ones as your consumers to buy your yearly "upgraded" gadgets and vitamin waters and import immigrants to do the service work. As you take away the benefits and welfare, the immigrants won't protest because they never even knew they existed.

There's a fallacy that since WW2 and the short period of financial reckoning millions of military trained men returning could quietly, purposely force from their governments everything will just get a bit better by default every year. For a select few, sure, for the majority of us cost of living from groceries to housing has decimated the existing middle class and it's attainability for those trying to move up.

But lets all spend our time complaining about clickbait headlines and why my sexism/racism/ageism/incelism/disability/LGBQT2OWL is the one that deserves the most attention while they quietly undermine all of us in the underlying root cause of these issues, wealth inequality.