What most people are not saying is this: at or above that income, almost all the spare money is invested and made to grow big and fast.
Very true. If my OH and I spent like water on cars, clothes and holidays we'd have nothing left within a year. The majority of our income is invested, much of it very long-term.
I think the crucial thing is this: money only makes easier the parts of life that can be paid for.
Much else in the human experience - as I mentioned the other day, stuff like illness, family problems, bereavement - is universal.
If someone's partner dies young, it would be offensive to tell that person that their money makes that emotional experience better, just because they were able to pay for a nicer coffin. (This happened to a good friend of mine, once.)
I also think that inverse snobbery, and the idea that high-paid people are not 'worth' their salaries, is as divisive as the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. There is simply never going to be a consensus on a scale of worth for the jobs people do. The remunerative scales that dictate that a footballer is paid X whereas a nurse is paid Y have nothing in common with each other, and it's very difficult to draw an argument that says they do without getting into the straw-person argument of moral outrage.
Sidebar: anyone who is interested in money, how it works (or doesn't work) and some of the terminology around it, I highly recommend John Lanchester's book How to Speak Money. It is accessible, funny and very smart.
His definition of a mortgage: a highly leveraged form of long-term borrowing with regular demands for cash payment against an illiquid asset that is known to be even more illiquid in difficult times.