TSO posts this review of a book titled The Two Income Trap:
Married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts….the authors point to the unintended consequences of sending 20 million American mothers to work. Rather than gaining more disposable household income, families saw real wages for men decline: the predictable result of more laborers pursuing the same number of jobs…. The higher nominal incomes of two-earner families also led to a fresh “bidding war” for nice homes in good suburban school districts, sending mortgage costs soaring….
Most important, the oft-derided stay-at-home mother proved to have been the true “safety net” in American life….
Wasn’t that TSO quoting someone else’s review at Amazon?
you’re right, I was — well, I was sleepy when I saw the post and kind of missed that very important fact. Will correct.
Yep. I figured this out once for a client couple. He made $15.00 per hour as machinist. She made $9.00 per hour as a line worker. After deducting the extra costs for transportation, car insurance, work clothes, quick-prep and take-out food (necessitated by not being home to cook), and day care, the lady was netting $5.00 per day.
I told them she’d be better off learning how to cook, and they ought to buy a sewing machine so she could make all their clothes and save them even more money, and within a few years they’d have thousands in the bank.
They looked at me like I was nuts. She says, “Do you think I’m just gonna be some kind of a housewife?” I say, “No. I think you’re just gonna be some kind of third-world wage slave, except some of them do better than twenty-five bucks a week.”