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At 17:28 -0400 6/2/06, Richard Tarara wrote:
What's been 'forced' on people is the expectation that one must live at aFifty and more years ago, when I was a kid, that was true, for the most part. But times have changed, and wages have not kept up with the changing times, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. Housing costs are now so high that if you earn not much more than the minimum wage (and there are lots of people in that category, not just students and young people), the meagerest housing can easily cost as much as 50% of your take-home pay, way more than financial advisors think is a healthy fraction of one's income should go for housing.
level beyond the means of a single salary--pretty much regardless of how
high that single salary is. There IS a real problem at the lowest end of
the socio-economic spectrum, but there is also the problem that children
are produced by people who don't have the economic (and sometimes other)
means to raise them.
When I was in college, you could buy a serviceable new or nearly new car for $1000 or less, about half to two-thirds of a minimum-wage salary. Today, it is hard to find a driveable car that won't eat up it's low cost in high maintenance for under $10,000, which is nearly 100% of a minimum wage annual salary.
And who can afford medical care? With even the cheapest insurance costing upwards of $500/month per person, almost no one at the low end of the salary spectrum (where employers seldom offer company paid health insurance) can hope to afford it.
It is possible to eat on a minimum wage, but not well, and probably not healthily, and if you live in a poor neighborhood, you likely won't find a decent-priced supermarket, and may have to get much of the food you eat at a local convenience store, where you will pay dearly for whatever you get.
Yes, there are some who are happy to live beyond their means, or feel that they owe to themselves to do so. And there are also many families where both parents work just to support that inflated life-style. But these people are not at the lower end of the pay structure. And from what I've heard recently, starting salaries at any but the most elite universities (and even at some of them), are not in the area where it is at all convenient for one parent to stay at home.
And among the professional class, where, it most cases the wife also has a college degree, and often an advanced or professional degree (after all, where do college professors mostly meet their future wives?), why does it have to be assumed that if one member of the family can stay home, it should be the wife?
Making assumptions like this in discussions like this is no less sexist than making the assumption that an African-American you meet will necessarily not be professionally trained and will probably be in a serving position is racist.
Hugh